Mingyan Liu

Micro Fluidization: Fundamentals and Applications provides background and history on micro fluidized bed research and development, summarizes and analyzes the hydrodynamic characteristics of gas-solid micro fluidized beds, and delves into areas such as research results of delayed onsets of minimum, bubbling and slugging fluidization regimes, as well as of the advanced transitions to turbulent and fast fluidization regimes. Based on these results, the wall effects – the key mechanism resulting in the unique behavior of micro fluidization – are analyzed. Other sections discuss gas and solid mixing characteristics in terms of gas residence time distribution, gas backmixing, and solids mixing. Final sections focus on presentations of the so-called micro fluidized bed reaction analyzer (MFBRA) – a powerful tool for catalyst screening, process development, optimization of reaction parameters, studies of reaction mechanism and kinetics, among many other purposes. The book describes, in detail, the MFBRA’s system design characteristics, analytic methodologies and various applications in thermochemical and catalytic reaction analysis.

This book provides an introduction to the theory and practice of cyber insurance. Insurance as an economic instrument designed for risk management through risk spreading has existed for centuries. Cyber insurance is one of the newest sub-categories of this old instrument. It emerged in the 1990s in response to an increasing impact that information security started to have on business operations. For much of its existence, the practice of cyber insurance has been on how to obtain accurate actuarial information to inform specifics of a cyber insurance contract. As the cybersecurity threat landscape continues to bring about novel forms of attacks and losses, ransomware insurance being the latest example, the insurance practice is also evolving in terms of what types of losses are covered, what are excluded, and how cyber insurance intersects with traditional casualty and property insurance. The central focus, however, has continued to be risk management through risk transfer, the key functionality of insurance. The goal of this book is to shift the focus from this conventional view of using insurance as primarily a risk management mechanism to one of risk control and reduction by looking for ways to re-align the incentives. On this front we have encouraging results that suggest the validity of using insurance as an effective economic and incentive tool to control cyber risk. This book is intended for someone interested in obtaining a quantitative understanding of cyber insurance and how innovation is possible around this centuries-old financial instrument.

This monograph provides a tutorial on a family of sequential learning and decision problems known as the multi-armed bandit problems. In such problems, any decision serves the purpose of exploring or exploiting or both. This balancing act between exploration and exploitation is characteristic of this type of ""learning-on-the-go"" problem, in which we have to instantaneously apply what we have learned so far, even as we continue to learn. The authors give an in-depth introduction to the technical aspects of the theory of decision-making technologies. The range is comprehensive and covers topics that have applications in many networking systems. These include Recommender systems, Ad Placement systems, the smart grid, and clinical trials. Online Learning Methods for Networking is essential reading for students working in networking and machine learning. Designers of many network-based systems will find it a valuable resource for improving their technology.

This book reports on important nonlinear aspects or deterministic chaos issues in the systems of multi-phase reactors. The reactors treated in the book include gas-liquid bubble columns, gas-liquid-solid fluidized beds and gas-liquid-solid magnetized fluidized beds. The authors take pressure fluctuations in the bubble columns as time series for nonlinear analysis, modeling and forecasting. They present qualitative and quantitative non-linear analysis tools which include attractor phase plane plot, correlation dimension, Kolmogorov entropy and largest Lyapunov exponent calculations and local non-linear short-term prediction.