At the rate that government and nongovernmental organizations are clearing existing landmines, it will take 450-500 years to rid the world of them. Concerned about the slow pace of demining, the Office of Science and Technology asked RAND to assess potential innovative technologies being explored and to project what funding would be required to foster the development of the more promising ones. The authors of this report suggest that the federal government undertake a research and development effort to develop a multisensor mine detection system over the next five to eight years.

The chapters in this volume were presented at the July–August 2008 NATO Advanced Study Institute on Unexploded Ordnance Detection and Mitigation. The conference was held at the beautiful Il Ciocco resort near Lucca, in the glorious Tuscany region of northern Italy. For the ninth time we gathered at this idyllic spot to explore and extend the reciprocity between mathematics and engineering. The dynamic interaction between world-renowned scientists from the usually disparate communities of pure mathematicians and applied scientists which occurred at our eight previous ASI’s continued at this meeting. The detection and neutralization of unexploded ordnance (UXO) has been of major concern for very many decades; at least since the First World war. UXO continues to be the subject of intensive research in many ?elds of science, incl- ing mathematics, signal processing (mainly radar and sonar) and chemistry. While today’s headlines emphasize the mayhem resulting from the placement of imp- vised explosive devices (IEDs), humanitarian landmine clearing continues to draw signi?cant global attention as well. In many countries of the world, landmines threaten the population and hinder reconstruction and fast, ef?cient utilization of large areas of the mined land in the aftermath of military con?icts.

The OECD report 'The Ocean Economy in 2030' predicts that the global maritime economy will grow by 100% in the period from 2010 to 2030. In the same year, there are expected to be more than 40 million people working in the sector globally. This potential is reflected in various national strategy papers of industrialised nations. With its long-term 'Blue Growth' strategy the European Union aims to develop and expand the continent's leading maritime industry sectors through targeted funding. The precondition for the widespread use of the sea is safe access to the sea floor. However, this access is impeded and in some cases made impossible by the presence of 1.6 million tonnes of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in German marine waters alone. Already today, unexploded ordnance (UXO) in the sea plays a part in some of our country's major societal challenges. For example, the success of the energy transition relies on the ability to erect wind parks in the North and Baltic Seas. I addition, visionary infrastructure projects such as the Fehmarnbelt tunnel can only be realised if the construction ground is guaranteed to be free of UXO. The safety of personnel and technical equipment in shipping, fisheries, aqua-culture and deep sea mining depends on whether comprehensive solutions for the explosive ordnance disposal in the sea are found. Finally, beach goes shall be able to spend carefree holi-days at the beaches of Germany's coastal states. The present quality guideline was developed to address the current challenges associated with offshore explosive ordnance disposal (EOD). The actors in EOD often act in the absence of clearly defined standards. There is no recognised industry wide method of checking the suitability of organisational procedures, deployed personnel, devices used and the handling of these devices. This situation is mainly due to the fact that a framework for formal recognition is lacking. The explosive ordnance disposal sector is also under immense cost pressure

This book consists of papers on the recent progresses in the state of the art in natural computation, fuzzy systems and knowledge discovery. The book is useful for researchers, including professors, graduate students, as well as R & D staff in the industry, with a general interest in natural computation, fuzzy systems and knowledge discovery. The work printed in this book was presented at the 2020 16th International Conference on Natural Computation, Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (ICNC-FSKD 2020), held in Xi'an, China, from 19 to 21 December 2020. All papers were rigorously peer-reviewed by experts in the areas.