The papers in this volume present an overview of the general aspects and practical applications of dynamic inverse methods, through the interaction of several topics, ranging from classical and advanced inverse problems in vibration, isospectral systems, dynamic methods for structural identification, active vibration control and damage detection, imaging shear stiffness in biological tissues, wave propagation, to computational and experimental aspects relevant for engineering problems.

While the prediction of observations is a forward problem, the use of actual observations to infer the properties of a model is an inverse problem. Inverse problems are difficult because they may not have a unique solution. The description of uncertainties plays a central role in the theory, which is based on probability theory. This book proposes a general approach that is valid for linear as well as for nonlinear problems. The philosophy is essentially probabilistic and allows the reader to understand the basic difficulties appearing in the resolution of inverse problems. The book attempts to explain how a method of acquisition of information can be applied to actual real-world problems, and many of the arguments are heuristic.

Provides a basic understanding of both the underlying mathematics and the computational methods used to solve inverse problems.

Inverse problems need to be solved in order to properly interpret indirect measurements. Often, inverse problems are ill-posed and sensitive to data errors. Therefore one has to incorporate some sort of regularization to reconstruct significant information from the given data. A Taste of Inverse Problems: Basic Theory and Examples?presents the main achievements that have emerged in regularization theory over the past 50 years, focusing on linear ill-posed problems and the development of methods that can be applied to them. Some of this material has previously appeared only in journal articles. This book rigorously discusses state-of-the-art inverse problems theory, focusing on numerically relevant aspects and omitting subordinate generalizations; presents diverse real-world applications, important test cases, and possible pitfalls; and treats these applications with the same rigor and depth as the theory.

In this book, leading experts in the theoretical and applied aspects of inverse problems offer extended surveys on several important topics.

Inverse Problems is a monograph which contains a self-contained presentation of the theory of several major inverse problems and the closely related results from the theory of ill-posed problems. The book is aimed at a large audience which include graduate students and researchers in mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences and in the area of numerical analysis.

Neural field theory has a long-standing tradition in the mathematical and computational neurosciences. Beginning almost 50 years ago with seminal work by Griffiths and culminating in the 1970ties with the models of Wilson and Cowan, Nunez and Amari, this important research area experienced a renaissance during the 1990ties by the groups of Ermentrout, Robinson, Bressloff, Wright and Haken. Since then, much progress has been made in both, the development of mathematical and numerical techniques and in physiological refinement und understanding. In contrast to large-scale neural network models described by huge connectivity matrices that are computationally expensive in numerical simulations, neural field models described by connectivity kernels allow for analytical treatment by means of methods from functional analysis. Thus, a number of rigorous results on the existence of bump and wave solutions or on inverse kernel construction problems are nowadays available. Moreover, neural fields provide an important interface for the coupling of neural activity to experimentally observable data, such as the electroencephalogram (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). And finally, neural fields over rather abstract feature spaces, also called dynamic fields, found successful applications in the cognitive sciences and in robotics. Up to now, research results in neural field theory have been disseminated across a number of distinct journals from mathematics, computational neuroscience, biophysics, cognitive science and others. There is no comprehensive collection of results or reviews available yet. With our proposed book Neural Field Theory, we aim at filling this gap in the market. We received consent from some of the leading scientists in the field, who are willing to write contributions for the book, among them are two of the founding-fathers of neural field theory: Shun-ichi Amari and Jack Cowan.