In this rapidly evolving world of knowledge and technology, do you ever wonder how hydrology is catching up? Here, two highly qualified scientists edit a volume that takes the angle of computational hydrology and envision one of the science’s future directions – namely, the quantitative integration of high-quality hydrologic field data with geologic, hydrologic, chemical, atmospheric, and biological information to characterize and predict natural systems in hydrological sciences.

In this rapidly evolving world of knowledge and technology, do you ever wonder how hydrology is catching up? Here, two highly qualified scientists edit a volume that takes the angle of computational hydrology and envision one of the science’s future directions – namely, the quantitative integration of high-quality hydrologic field data with geologic, hydrologic, chemical, atmospheric, and biological information to characterize and predict natural systems in hydrological sciences.

In this rapidly evolving world of knowledge and technology, do you ever wonder how hydrology is catching up? Here, two highly qualified scientists edit a volume that takes the angle of computational hydrology and envision one of the science’s future directions – namely, the quantitative integration of high-quality hydrologic field data with geologic, hydrologic, chemical, atmospheric, and biological information to characterize and predict natural systems in hydrological sciences.

Precipitation is a well-recognized pillar in global water and energy balances. An accurate and timely understanding of its characteristics at the global, regional, and local scales is indispensable for a clearer understanding of the mechanisms underlying the Earth’s atmosphere–ocean complex system. Precipitation is one of the elements that is documented to be greatly affected by climate change. In its various forms, precipitation comprises a primary source of freshwater, which is vital for the sustainability of almost all human activities. Its socio-economic significance is fundamental in managing this natural resource effectively, in applications ranging from irrigation to industrial and household usage. Remote sensing of precipitation is pursued through a broad spectrum of continuously enriched and upgraded instrumentation, embracing sensors which can be ground-based (e.g., weather radars), satellite-borne (e.g., passive or active space-borne sensors), underwater (e.g., hydrophones), aerial, or ship-borne.

The last decades have shown a remarkable increase in the number of heavy rains, typhoons and earthquakes. These natural phenomena are the main causes for geohazards. As a result the mitigation of geohazards has become a major research topic in geotechnical engineering, and in recent years simulation-based predictions and monitoring tools have been

Support vector machines (SVMs) are one of the most active research areas in machine learning. SVMs have shown good performance in a number of applications, including text and image classification. However, the learning capability of SVMs comes at a cost – an inherent inability to explain in a comprehensible form, the process by which a learning result was reached. Hence, the situation is similar to neural networks, where the apparent lack of an explanation capability has led to various approaches aiming at extracting symbolic rules from neural networks. For SVMs to gain a wider degree of acceptance in fields such as medical diagnosis and security sensitive areas, it is desirable to offer an explanation capability. User explanation is often a legal requirement, because it is necessary to explain how a decision was reached or why it was made. This book provides an overview of the field and introduces a number of different approaches to extracting rules from support vector machines developed by key researchers. In addition, successful applications are outlined and future research opportunities are discussed. The book is an important reference for researchers and graduate students, and since it provides an introduction to the topic, it will be important in the classroom as well. Because of the significance of both SVMs and user explanation, the book is of relevance to data mining practitioners and data analysts.

This book presents hardware-efficient algorithms and FPGA implementations for two robotic tasks, namely exploration and landmark determination. The work identifies scenarios for mobile robotics where parallel processing and selective shutdown offered by FPGAs are invaluable. The book proceeds to systematically develop memory-driven VLSI architectures for both the tasks. The architectures are ported to a low-cost FPGA with a fairly small number of system gates.