★★★★★ Readers’ Favorite"With the fast-paced nature of modern life, people often tend to miss out on enjoying the little things that life has to offer. Zen Musings From a Fly on the Wall is a collection of inspiring essays…[that] encourage readers to soak in everything around us and find beauty in their essence. Chen has an engaging and accessible writing style that will appeal to all readers. You can open any page in the book and read...

This textbook provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to Semantic Communications, focusing on how deep learning enhances its performance in modern communication systems. The purpose of the book is to offer students, researchers, and engineers a solid understanding of the theoretical principles and practical applications of semantic communication. The text builds from foundational concepts to advanced topics, making it suitable for graduate-level courses and beyond, while also serving ...

This book examines China’s fertility transition over the past seven decades and explores the socioeconomic impacts of the two-child policy.The first half of this book highlights the characteristics of China’s low fertility and the risk of falling to an ultra-low state, aiming to answer the question: How China’s fertility is changing and evolving? How low is China’s fertility? What are the demographic structure, driving forces and institutional characteristics of China’s low fer...

We are all too easy to get lost either in love or in career among the mundane crowd where the noise, self-conceit, and lack of communication create invisable wall between heart and heart, especially between those sweethearts. How is it painful to imprison ourselves when sunshine looks just within our touch but the unnamble silence mutes all supposed-to-be happiness! How to deal with it? Should we sink or should we rise and dance? Where could we hear the inner voice of the beloved and where...

This insightful and expert-led volume presents a holistic view of the latest, cutting-edge global research on trends and changes in consumer behaviour in hospitality and tourism, with focus on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on purchase patterns within the industries.The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of consumer behaviour, including expenses, ways of shopping, eating, lifestyle, use of technology and individual decision-making processes. This volu...

Building upon the fundamental principles of decision theory, Decision-Based Design: Integrating Consumer Preferences into Engineering Design presents an analytical approach to enterprise-driven Decision-Based Design (DBD) as a rigorous framework for decision making in engineering design. Once the related fundamentals of decision theory, economic analysis, and econometrics modelling are established, the remaining chapters describe the entire process, the associated analytical techniques, an...

This thesis is devoted to the study of the Bohman-Frieze-Wormald percolation model, which exhibits a discontinuous transition at the critical threshold, while the phase transitions in random networks are originally considered to be robust continuous phase transitions. The underlying mechanism that leads to the discontinuous transition in this model is carefully analyzed and many interesting critical behaviors, including multiple giant components, multiple phase transitions, and unstable gi...

This book is a valuable resource for understanding the transformative role of artificial intelligence in modern healthcare and aims to inspire continued research and collaboration across disciplines. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a transformative technology across various fields, with medical image analysis standing out as one of its most impactful applications. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in this fast-evolving domain, bridging found...

This book is about the inner life of buildings—how architecture lands in the body, moment by moment, as breath, posture, tension, ease, and attention.It begins with a quiet question: why do so many spaces look extraordinary yet feel lacking from the inside? When image, performance, and optimisation dominate the narrative, the subtler work of space—how it steadies or unsettles the nervous system—often goes unnamed. Moving between neuroscience, phenomenology, movement psychology, and...

This book provides an overview of the physiological basis of lactic acid bacteria and their applications in minimizing foodborne risks, such as pathogens, heavy metal pollution, biotoxin contamination and food‐based allergies. While highlighting the mechanisms responsible for these biological effects, it also addresses the challenges and opportunities that lactic acid bacteria represent in food safety management.It offers a valuable resource for researchers, graduate students, nutr...

This 20-volume set LNCS 15842-15861 constitutes - in conjunction with the 4-volume set LNAI 15862-15865 and the 4-volume set LNBI 15866-15869 - the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Intelligent Computing, ICIC 2025, held in Ningbo, China, during July 26-29, 2025.The total of 1206 regular papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 4032 submissions.This year, the conference concentrated mainly on the theories and methodologies as well as the e...

This 2-volume set CCIS 2387 + 2388 constitutes the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Applied Intelligence, ICAI 2024, held in Zhengzhou, China, during November 22-25, 2024.The 72 full papers presented in this proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 228 submissions. The papers cover a wide range on theoretical aspects of biomedical data modeling and mining; computer vision; and deep learning. They were organized in topical sections as follows: