The book addresses and documents farmers' risks in developing and emerging economies. It draws lessons from experimental economics on measuring risk preferences, attitudes, gender differences in managing risks, and risk management strategies in countries across Africa and Asia. It argues policy makers, especially in emerging economies, need a better understanding of farmers' attitudes toward risk and choices of risk management strategies when designing policies to support production agricu...

This book systematically introduces readers to computational granular mechanics and its relative engineering applications. Part I describes the fundamentals, such as the generation of irregular particle shapes, contact models, macro-micro theory, DEM-FEM coupling, and solid-fluid coupling of granular materials. It also discusses the theory behind various numerical methods developed in recent years. Further, it provides the GPU-based parallel algorithm to guide the programming of DEM and ex...

This book reviews the theoretical concepts, leading-edge techniques and practical tools involved in the latest multi-disciplinary approaches addressing the challenges of big data. Illuminating perspectives from both academia and industry are presented by an international selection of experts in big data science. Topics and features: describes the innovative advances in theoretical aspects of big data, predictive analytics and cloud-based architectures; examines the applications and impleme...

Provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges facing agri-food supply chains, including the need to be more sustainable in light of the high environmental costs of global distributionAddresses the external factors that can impact the logistics and performance of supply chains, including political developments, international conflicts and pandemics such as COVID-19Reviews the main agri-food supply chains used in different regions around the world, focussing o...

An enterprise architecture tries to describe and control an organisation’s structure, processes, applications, systems and techniques in an integrated way. The unambiguous specification and description of components and their relationships in such an architecture requires a coherent architecture modelling language.Lankhorst and his co‑authors present such an enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations and allows the constr...

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect in business process management for experts to handle, by contrast computer science professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction.Mat...

The issue of data quality is as old as data itself. However, the proliferation of diverse, large-scale and often publically available data on the Web has increased the risk of poor data quality and misleading data interpretations. On the other hand, data is now exposed at a much more strategic level e.g. through business intelligence systems, increasing manifold the stakes involved for individuals, corporations as well as government agencies. There, the lack of knowledge about data accurac...

Cyberspace in increasingly important to people in their everyday lives for purchasing goods on the Internet, to energy supply increasingly managed remotely using Internet protocols. Unfortunately, this dependence makes us susceptible to attacks from nation states, terrorists, criminals and hactivists. Therefore, we need a better understanding of cyberspace, for which patterns, which are predictable regularities, may help to detect, understand and respond to incidents better. The inspiratio...

This successful textbook on predictive text mining offers a unified perspective on a rapidly evolving field, integrating topics spanning the varied disciplines of data science, machine learning, databases, and computational linguistics. Serving also as a practical guide, this unique book provides helpful advice illustrated by examples and case studies. This highly anticipated second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded with new material on deep learning, graph models, mining so...

Web services and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) have become thriving areas of academic research, joint university/industry research projects, and novel IT products on the market. SOC is the computing paradigm that uses Web services as building blocks for the engineering of composite, distributed applications out of the reusable application logic encapsulated by Web services. Web services could be considered the best-known and most standardized technology in use today for distributed comp...

The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data provides valuable information on analysis techniques often used to derive insight from software data. This book shares best practices in the field generated by leading data scientists, collected from their experience training software engineering students and practitioners to master data science. The book covers topics such as the analysis of security data, code reviews, app stores, log files, and user telemetry, among others. It covers a wide...

Web services and Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) have become thriving areas of academic research, joint university/industry research projects, and novel IT products on the market. SOC is the computing paradigm that uses Web services as building blocks for the engineering of composite, distributed applications out of the reusable application logic encapsulated by Web services. Web services could be considered the best-known and most standardized technology in use today for distributed comp...