Feng Liu

Is the environmental justice debate solely an economic issue? Is it a social issue as well as a moral, political, or science issue? In Environmental Justice Analysis: Theories, Methods, and Practice author Feng Liu suggests it is all of them. He presents a multi-perspective, multi-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approach to analyzing environmental justice issues. Liu demonstrates how cutting-edge technologies and methods such as the Internet, Geographic Information Systems, and modeling tools can contribute to better equity analysis and policy evaluations. He focuses on the various methods of environmental justice research, providing you with an integrated framework for conducting rigorous equity analysis. Environmental Justice has just been placed at the head of the environmental policy agenda. Federal governments have a mandate to analyze the impacts of federal policies, programs, and projects on groups and communities. Carefully and critically examining all aspects of the issue, Environmental Justice Analysis: Theories, Methods, and Practice provides you with a comprehensive and analytical treatment of theories and methods for analyzing and assessing environmental justice and equity issues.

Merging Optimization and Control in Power Systems A novel exploration of distributed control in power systems with insightful discussions of physical and cyber restrictions In Merging Optimization and Control in Power Systems an accomplished team of engineers deliver a comprehensive introduction to distributed optimal control in power systems. The book re-imagines control design within the framework of cyber-physical systems with restrictions in both the physical and cyber spaces, addressing operational constraints, non-smooth objective functions, rapid power fluctuations caused by renewable generations, partial control coverage, communication delays, and non-identical sampling rates. This book bridges the gap between optimization and control in two ways. First, optimization-based feedback control is explored. The authors describe feedback controllers which automatically drive system states asymptotically to specific, desired optimal working points. Second, the book discusses feedback-based optimization. Leveraging the philosophy of feedback control, the authors envision the online solving of complicated optimization and control problems of power systems to adapt to time-varying environments. Readers will also find: A thorough argument against the traditional and centralized hierarchy of power system control in favor of the merged approach described in the bookComprehensive explorations of the fundamental changes gripping the power system today, including the increasing penetration of renewable and distributed generation, the proliferation of electric vehicles, and increases in load demandData, tables, illustrations, and case studies covering realistic power systems and experimentsIn-depth examinations of physical and cyber restrictions, as well as the robustness and adaptability of the proposed model Perfect for postgraduate students and researchers with the prerequisite knowledge of power system analysis, operation, and dynamics, convex optimization theory, and control theory, Merging Optimization and Control in Power Systems is an advanced and timely treatment of distributed optimal controller design.

Fingerprints are among the most widely used biometric modalities and have been successfully applied in various scenarios. For example, in forensics, fingerprints serve as important legal evidence; and in civilian applications, fingerprints are used for access and attendance control as well as other identity services. Thanks to advances in three-dimensional (3D) and high-resolution imaging technology, it is now feasible to capture 3D or high-resolution fingerprints to provide extra information and go beyond the traditional features such as global ridge patterns and local ridge singularities used in conventional fingerprint recognition tasks. This book presents the state of the art in the acquisition and analysis of 3D and high-resolution fingerprints. Based on the authors’ research, this book focuses on advanced fingerprint recognition using 3D fingerprint features (i.e., finger shape, level 0 features) or high-resolution fingerprint features (i.e., ridge detail, level 3 features). It is a valuable resource for researchers, professionals and graduate students working in the field of computer vision, pattern recognition, security/biometrics practice, as well as interdisciplinary researchers.

This book "The Symphony of High Dimensional Wisdoms" uses the scientific context and builds an intertwined network of wisdom systems. The theory in this book is the common intellectual wealth of mankind and does not belong to any person or organization. It is a hub connecting all wisdom languages; an internal bridge that seeks commonalities and existing for the harmonious symphony of multiculturalism in the world. The fundamental meaning of life is to improve the dimension of consciousness energy. We should have sufficient confidence in our internal environment to harness energy of all dimensions. That means believing in the presence of higher-dimension wisdom within. Everyone has enough internally, and the internal wisdom is N - dimensional (with N approaching infinity).

Fingerprints are among the most widely used biometric modalities and have been successfully applied in various scenarios. For example, in forensics, fingerprints serve as important legal evidence; and in civilian applications, fingerprints are used for access and attendance control as well as other identity services. Thanks to advances in three-dimensional (3D) and high-resolution imaging technology, it is now feasible to capture 3D or high-resolution fingerprints to provide extra information and go beyond the traditional features such as global ridge patterns and local ridge singularities used in conventional fingerprint recognition tasks. This book presents the state of the art in the acquisition and analysis of 3D and high-resolution fingerprints. Based on the authors’ research, this book focuses on advanced fingerprint recognition using 3D fingerprint features (i.e., finger shape, level 0 features) or high-resolution fingerprint features (i.e., ridge detail, level 3 features). It is a valuable resource for researchers, professionals and graduate students working in the field of computer vision, pattern recognition, security/biometrics practice, as well as interdisciplinary researchers.

Is the environmental justice debate solely an economic issue? Is it a social issue as well as a moral, political, or science issue? In Environmental Justice Analysis: Theories, Methods, and Practice author Feng Liu suggests it is all of them. He presents a multi-perspective, multi-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approach to analyzing environmental justice issues. Liu demonstrates how cutting-edge technologies and methods such as the Internet, Geographic Information Systems, and modeling tools can contribute to better equity analysis and policy evaluations. He focuses on the various methods of environmental justice research, providing you with an integrated framework for conducting rigorous equity analysis. Environmental Justice has just been placed at the head of the environmental policy agenda. Federal governments have a mandate to analyze the impacts of federal policies, programs, and projects on groups and communities. Carefully and critically examining all aspects of the issue, Environmental Justice Analysis: Theories, Methods, and Practice provides you with a comprehensive and analytical treatment of theories and methods for analyzing and assessing environmental justice and equity issues.

This book addresses the fundamental concepts in the theory and practice of visual cryptography. The design, construction, analysis, and application of visual cryptography schemes (VCSs) are discussed in detail. Original, cutting-edge research is presented on probabilistic, size invariant, threshold, concolorous, and cheating immune VCS. This updated second edition has also been expanded with new content on braille and 2D barcode authentication of visual cryptography shares. Features: contains review exercises at the end of each chapter, as well as a helpful glossary; examines various common problems in visual cryptography, including the alignment, flipping, cheating, distortion, and thin line problems; reviews a range of VCSs, including XOR-based visual cryptography and security enriched VCS; describes different methods for presenting color content using visual cryptographic techniques; covers such applications of visual cryptography as watermarking, resolution variant VCS, and multiple resolution VCS.

This book addresses the fundamental concepts in the theory and practice of visual cryptography. The design, construction, analysis, and application of visual cryptography schemes (VCSs) are discussed in detail. Original, cutting-edge research is presented on probabilistic, size invariant, threshold, concolorous, and cheating immune VCS. This updated second edition has also been expanded with new content on braille and 2D barcode authentication of visual cryptography shares. Features: contains review exercises at the end of each chapter, as well as a helpful glossary; examines various common problems in visual cryptography, including the alignment, flipping, cheating, distortion, and thin line problems; reviews a range of VCSs, including XOR-based visual cryptography and security enriched VCS; describes different methods for presenting color content using visual cryptographic techniques; covers such applications of visual cryptography as watermarking, resolution variant VCS, and multiple resolution VCS.

Civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, stadiums, and offshore structures play an import role in our daily life. However, constructing these structures requires lots of budget. Thus, how to cost-efficiently design structures satisfying all required design constraints is an important factor to structural engineers. Traditionally, mathematical gradient-based optimal techniques have been applied to the design of optimal structures. While, many practical engineering optimal problems are very complex and hard to solve by traditional method. In the past few decades, swarm intelligence algorithms, which were inspired by the social behaviour of natural animals such as fish schooling and bird flocking, were developed because they do not require conventional mathematical assumptions and thus possess better global search abilities than the traditional optimization algorithms and have attracted more and more attention. These intelligent basedalgorithms are very suitable for continuous and discrete design variable problems such as ready-made structural members and have been vigorously applied to various structural design problems and obtained good results. This book gathers the authors’ latest research work related with particle swarm optimizer algorithm and group search optimizer algorithm as well as their application to structural optimal design. The readers can understand the full spectrum of the algorithms and apply the algorithms to their own research problems.

Civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, stadiums, and offshore structures play an import role in our daily life. However, constructing these structures requires lots of budget. Thus, how to cost-efficiently design structures satisfying all required design constraints is an important factor to structural engineers. Traditionally, mathematical gradient-based optimal techniques have been applied to the design of optimal structures. While, many practical engineering optimal problems are very complex and hard to solve by traditional method. In the past few decades, swarm intelligence algorithms, which were inspired by the social behaviour of natural animals such as fish schooling and bird flocking, were developed because they do not require conventional mathematical assumptions and thus possess better global search abilities than the traditional optimization algorithms and have attracted more and more attention. These intelligent basedalgorithms are very suitable for continuous and discrete design variable problems such as ready-made structural members and have been vigorously applied to various structural design problems and obtained good results. This book gathers the authors’ latest research work related with particle swarm optimizer algorithm and group search optimizer algorithm as well as their application to structural optimal design. The readers can understand the full spectrum of the algorithms and apply the algorithms to their own research problems.

Identifies a set of viable and affordable low-carbon interventions that would allow Mexico to achieve substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions without sacrificing economic and social development.