Forecasting is required in many situations. Stocking an inventory may require forecasts of demand months in advance. Telecommunication routing requires traffic forecasts a few minutes ahead. Whatever the circumstances or time horizons involved, forecasting is an important aid in effective and efficient planning. This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods and presents enough information about each method for readers to use them sensibly.

Astrology and interest in it have been growing at a pace that does justice to the subject as a discipline of great consequence in handling the complexities and ills of human life and existence. The Art of Prediction in Astrology is a simple guide to the techniques of interpretation of the horoscope. This book teaches how to apply and interpret some important planetary combinations and dicta found in classical works to practical cases. This shows further how to analyse and understand:*Yogas for fame and lasting reputation, renunciation, spiritual realization, tyranny and homicidal tendencies.*Difficult concepts such as the difference between Resi and Bhave, Yamaganda and Yamakantaka, the Moon's role in understanding human psychology and behavious and the nexus between Rahu-Ketu and schizophrenic tendencies.*Eclipses and how they influence the timing of events.*Solar activity and planetary movements in relation to weather, agricultural crops and tsunamis.*Principles of Muhurta and natal horoscopy in making forecasts on the fall and continuance of governments and how Martian movements can trigger terrorist attacks such as that of September 11, 2001.*Simplifies the intricate art of chart delineation with illustrations of important personalities.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the cavitation erosion phenomenon and state-of-the-art research in the field. It is divided into two parts. Part 1 consists of seven chapters, offering a wide range of computational and experimental approaches to cavitation erosion. It includes a general introduction to cavitation and cavitation erosion a detailed description of facilities and measurement techniques commonly used in cavitation erosion studies, an extensive presentation of various stages of cavitation damage (including incubation and mass loss) and insights into the contribution of computational methods to the analysis of both fluid and material behavior. The proposed approach is based on a detailed description of impact loads generated by collapsing cavitation bubbles and a physical analysis of the material response to these loads. Part 2 is devoted to a selection of nine papers presented at the International Workshop on Advanced Experimental and Numerical Techniques for Cavitation Erosion Prediction (Grenoble, France, 1-2 March 2011) representing the forefront of research on cavitation erosion. Innovative numerical and experimental investigations illustrate the most advanced breakthroughs in cavitation erosion research.

The second edition of Advanced Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy covers advanced helping- skills topics, including inductive reasoning, Socratic questioning, and creatively creating second- order change. Chapters explore strategies for using paradoxical interventions, including the use of humor, and working with double- binds. Professors and students alike will find that Advanced Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy, 2nd ed., is not just a guide to training; it provides an in- depth understanding of material covered in introductory courses and supplements the material students will cover in practicum and internship.

In recent years, the paradigm of video coding has shifted from that of a frame-based approach to a content-based approach, particularly with the finalization of the ISO multimedia coding standard, MPEG-4. MPEG-4 is the emerging standard for the coding of multimedia content. It defines a syntax for a set of content-based functionalities, namely, content-based interactivity, compression and universal access. However, it does not specify how the video content is to be generated. To generate the video content, video has to be segmented into video objects and tracked as they transverse across the video frames. This book addresses the difficult problem of video segmentation, and the extraction and tracking of video object planes as defined in MPEG-4. It then focuses on the specific issue of face segmentation and coding as applied to videoconferencing in order to improve the quality of videoconferencing images especially in the facial region. Modal-based coding is a content-based coding technique used to code synthetic objects that have become an important part of video content. It results in extremely low bit rates because only the parameters needed to represent the modal are transmitted. Model-based coding is included to provide background information for the synthetic object coding in MPEG-4. Lastly, MPEG-4, the first coding standard for multimedia content is described in detail. The topics covered include the coding of audio objects, the coding of natural and synthetic video objects, and error resilience. Advanced Video Coding is one of the first books on content-based coding and MPEG-4 coding standard. It serves as an excellent information source and reference for both researchers and practicing engineers.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Hybrid Advanced Optimization Methods with Evolutionary Computation Techniques in Energy Forecasting" that was published in Energies

An overview of recent work in the field of structured prediction, the building of predictive machine learning models for interrelated and dependent outputs. The goal of structured prediction is to build machine learning models that predict relational information that itself has structure, such as being composed of multiple interrelated parts. These models, which reflect prior knowledge, task-specific relations, and constraints, are used in fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational biology. They can carry out such tasks as predicting a natural language sentence, or segmenting an image into meaningful components. These models are expressive and powerful, but exact computation is often intractable. A broad research effort in recent years has aimed at designing structured prediction models and approximate inference and learning procedures that are computationally efficient. This volume offers an overview of this recent research in order to make the work accessible to a broader research community. The chapters, by leading researchers in the field, cover a range of topics, including research trends, the linear programming relaxation approach, innovations in probabilistic modeling, recent theoretical progress, and resource-aware learning. Contributors Jonas Behr, Yutian Chen, Fernando De La Torre, Justin Domke, Peter V. Gehler, Andrew E. Gelfand, Sébastien Giguère, Amir Globerson, Fred A. Hamprecht, Minh Hoai, Tommi Jaakkola, Jeremy Jancsary, Joseph Keshet, Marius Kloft, Vladimir Kolmogorov, Christoph H. Lampert, François Laviolette, Xinghua Lou, Mario Marchand, André F. T. Martins, Ofer Meshi, Sebastian Nowozin, George Papandreou, Daniel Průša, Gunnar Rätsch, Amélie Rolland, Bogdan Savchynskyy, Stefan Schmidt, Thomas Schoenemann, Gabriele Schweikert, Ben Taskar, Sinisa Todorovic, Max Welling, David Weiss, Thomáš Werner, Alan Yuille, Stanislav Živný

"This book presents cutting-edge research and analysis of the most recent advancements in the fields of database systems and software development"--Provided by publisher.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems, ACIVS 2008, held in Juan-les-Pins, France, in October 2008. The 33 revised full papers and 69 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 179 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image and video coding; systems and applications; video processing; filtering and restoration; segmentation and feature extraction; tracking, scene understanding and computer vision; medical imaging; and biometrics and surveillance.

Advanced Control of Power Converters Unique resource presenting advanced nonlinear control methods for power converters, plus simulation, controller design, analyses, and case studies Advanced Control of Power Converters equips readers with the latest knowledge of three control methods developed for power converters: nonlinear control methods such as sliding mode control, Lyapunov-function-based control, and model predictive control. Readers will learn about the design of each control method, and simulation case studies and results will be presented and discussed to point out the behavior of each control method in different applications. In this way, readers wishing to learn these control methods can gain insight on how to design and simulate each control method easily. The book is organized into three clear sections: introduction of classical and advanced control methods, design of advanced control methods, and case studies. Each control method is supported by simulation examples along with Simulink models which are provided on a separate website. Contributed to by five highly qualified authors, Advanced Control of Power Converters covers sample topics such as: Mathematical modeling of single- and three-phase grid-connected inverter with LCL filter, three-phase dynamic voltage restorer, design of sliding mode control and switching frequency computation under single- and double-band hysteresis modulations Modeling of single-phase UPS inverter and three-phase rectifier and their Lyapunov-function-based control design for global stability assurance Design of model predictive control for single-phase T-type rectifier, three-phase shunt active power filter, three-phase quasi-Z-source inverter, three-phase rectifier, distributed generation inverters in islanded ac microgrids How to realize the Simulink models in sliding mode control, Lyapunov-function-based control and model predictive control How to build and run a real-time model as well as rapid prototyping of power converter by using OPAL-RT simulator Advanced Control of Power Converters is an ideal resource on the subject for researchers, engineering professionals, and undergraduate/graduate students in electrical engineering and mechatronics; as an advanced level book, and it is expected that readers will have prior knowledge of power converters and control systems.