Computational Approaches

Over the last fifty years, the ability to carry out analysis as a precursor to decision making in engineering design has increased dramatically. In particular, the advent of modern computing systems and the development of advanced numerical methods have made computational modelling a vital tool for producing optimized designs. This text explores how computer-aided analysis has revolutionized aerospace engineering, providing a comprehensive coverage of the latest technologies underpinning advanced computational design. Worked case studies and over 500 references to the primary research literature allow the reader to gain a full understanding of the technology, giving a valuable insight into the world’s most complex engineering systems. Key Features: Includes background information on the history of aerospace design and established optimization, geometrical and mathematical modelling techniques, setting recent engineering developments in a relevant context. Examines the latest methods such as evolutionary and response surface based optimization, adjoint and numerically differentiated sensitivity codes, uncertainty analysis, and concurrent systems integration schemes using grid-based computing. Methods are illustrated with real-world applications of structural statics, dynamics and fluid mechanics to satellite, aircraft and aero-engine design problems. Senior undergraduate and postgraduate engineering students taking courses in aerospace, vehicle and engine design will find this a valuable resource. It will also be useful for practising engineers and researchers working on computational approaches to design.

Computational Approaches in Physics reviews computational schemes which are used in the simulations of physical systems. These range from very accurate ab initio techniques up to coarse-grained and mesoscopic schemes. The choice of the method is based on the desired accuracy and computational efficiency. A bottom-up approach is used to present the various simulation methods used in Physics, starting from the lower level and the most accurate methods, up to particle-based ones. The book outlines the basic theory underlying each technique and its complexity, addresses the computational implications and issues in the implementation, as well as present representative examples. A link to the most common computational codes, commercial or open source is listed in each chapter. The strengths and deficiencies of the variety of techniques discussed in this book are presented in detail and visualization tools commonly used to make the simulation data more comprehensive are also discussed. In the end, specific techniques are used as bridges across different disciplines. To this end, examples of different systems tackled with the same methods are presented. The appendices include elements of physical theory which are prerequisites in understanding the simulation methods.

This volume of original chapters written by experts in the field offers a snapshot of how historical built spaces, past cultural landscapes, and archaeological distributions are currently being explored through computational social science. It focuses on the continuing importance of spatial and spatio-temporal pattern recognition in the archaeological record, considers more wholly model-based approaches that fix ideas and build theory, and addresses those applications where situated human experience and perception are a core interest. Reflecting the changes in computational technology over the past decade, the authors bring in examples from historic and prehistoric sites in Europe, Asia, and the Americas to demonstrate the variety of applications available to the contemporary researcher.

This book presents recently developed computational approaches for the study of reactive materials under extreme physical and thermodynamic conditions. It delves into cutting edge developments in simulation methods for reactive materials, including quantum calculations spanning nanometer length scales and picosecond timescales, to reactive force fields, coarse-grained approaches, and machine learning methods spanning microns and nanoseconds and beyond. These methods are discussed in the context of a broad range of fields, including prebiotic chemistry in impacting comets, studies of planetary interiors, high pressure synthesis of new compounds, and detonations of energetic materials. The book presents a pedagogical approach for these state-of-the-art approaches, compiled into a single source for the first time. Ultimately, the volume aims to make valuable research tools accessible to experimentalists and theoreticians alike for any number of scientific efforts, spanning many different types of compounds and reactive conditions.

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans. A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned knowledge and expertise of traditional historical linguistics with cutting-edge methodology explored primarily in computational linguistics. The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this challenge. The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together scholars from both fields. This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical problems — e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives.

Terrorist groups throughout the world have been studied primarily through the use of social science methods. However, major advances in IT during the past decade have led to significant new ways of studying terrorist groups, making forecasts, learning models of their behaviour, and shaping policies about their behaviour. Handbook of Computational Approaches to Counterterrorism provides the first in-depth look at how advanced mathematics and modern computing technology is shaping the study of terrorist groups. This book includes contributions from world experts in the field, and presents extensive information on terrorism data sets, new ways of building such data sets in real-time using text analytics, introduces the mathematics and computational approaches to understand terror group behaviour, analyzes terror networks, forecasts terror group behaviour, and shapes policies against terrorist groups. Auxiliary information will be posted on the book’s website. This book targets defence analysts, counter terror analysts, computer scientists, mathematicians, political scientists, psychologists, and researchers from the wide variety of fields engaged in counter-terrorism research. Advanced-level students in computer science, mathematics and social sciences will also find this book useful.

A breakthrough guide employing knowledge that unites cheminformatics and bioinformatics as innovation for the future Bridging the gap between cheminformatics and bioinformatics for the first time, Computational Approaches in Cheminformatics and Bioinformatics provides insight on how to blend these two sciences for progressive research benefits. It describes the development and evolution of these fields, how chemical information may be used for biological relations and vice versa, the implications of these new connections, and foreseeable developments in the future. Using algorithms and domains as workflow tools, this revolutionary text drives bioinformaticians to consider chemical structure, and similarly, encourages cheminformaticians to consider large biological systems such as protein targets and networks. Computational Approaches in Cheminformatics and Bioinformatics covers: Data sources available for modelling and prediction purposes Developments of conventional Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSAR) Computational tools for manipulating chemical and biological data Novel ways of probing the interactions between small molecules and proteins Also including insight from public (NIH), academic, and industrial sources (Novartis, Pfizer), this book offers expert knowledge to aid scientists through industry and academic study. The invaluable applications for drug discovery, cellular and molecular biology, enzymology, and metabolism make Computational Approaches in Cheminformatics and Bioinformatics the essential guidebook for evolving drug discovery research and alleviating the issue of chemical control and manipulation of various systems.

The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides a critical and practical guide to computational techniques for handling morphological and syntactic phenomena, showing how these techniques have been used and modified in practice. The authors discuss the nature and uses of syntactic parsers and examine the problems and opportunities of parsing algorithms for finite-state, context-free and various context-sensitive grammars. They relate approaches for describing syntax and morphology to formal mechanisms and algorithms, and present well-motivated approaches for augmenting grammars with weights or probabilities.

The development of materials for clean and efficient energy generation and storage is one of the most rapidly developing, multi-disciplinary areas of contemporary science, driven primarily by concerns over global warming, diminishing fossil-fuel reserves, the need for energy security, and increasing consumer demand for portable electronics. Computational methods are now an integral and indispensable part of the materials characterisation and development process. Computational Approaches to Energy Materials presents a detailed survey of current computational techniques for the development and optimization of energy materials, outlining their strengths, limitations, and future applications. The review of techniques includes current methodologies based on electronic structure, interatomic potential and hybrid methods. The methodological components are integrated into a comprehensive survey of applications, addressing the major themes in energy research. Topics covered include: • Introduction to computational methods and approaches • Modelling materials for energy generation applications: solar energy and nuclear energy • Modelling materials for storage applications: batteries and hydrogen • Modelling materials for energy conversion applications: fuel cells, heterogeneous catalysis and solid-state lighting • Nanostructures for energy applications This full colour text is an accessible introduction for newcomers to the field, and a valuable reference source for experienced researchers working on computational techniques and their application to energy materials.

Sequence - Evolution - Function is an introduction to the computational approaches that play a critical role in the emerging new branch of biology known as functional genomics. The book provides the reader with an understanding of the principles and approaches of functional genomics and of the potential and limitations of computational and experimental approaches to genome analysis. Sequence - Evolution - Function should help bridge the "digital divide" between biologists and computer scientists, allowing biologists to better grasp the peculiarities of the emerging field of Genome Biology and to learn how to benefit from the enormous amount of sequence data available in the public databases. The book is non-technical with respect to the computer methods for genome analysis and discusses these methods from the user's viewpoint, without addressing mathematical and algorithmic details. Prior practical familiarity with the basic methods for sequence analysis is a major advantage, but a reader without such experience will be able to use the book as an introduction to these methods. This book is perfect for introductory level courses in computational methods for comparative and functional genomics.