Bøger i Studies in Systems, Decision and Control serien

This book, dedicated to Professor Georgi M. Dimirovski on his anniversary, contains new research directions, challenges, and many relevant applications related to many aspects within the broadly perceived areas of systems and control, including signal analysis and intelligent systems. The project comprises two volumes with papers written by well known and very active researchers and practitioners. The first volume is focused on more foundational aspects related to general issues in systems science and mathematical systems, various problems in control and automation, and the use of computational and artificial intelligence in the context of systems modeling and control. The second volume is concerned with a presentation of relevant applications, notably in robotics, computer networks, telecommunication, fault detection/diagnosis, as well as in biology and medicine, and economic, financial, and social systems too. 

This book gathers cutting-edge research and best practices relating to occupational risk and safety management, healthcare and ergonomics. It covers strategies for different industries, such as construction, chemical and healthcare. It emphasises challenges posed by automation, discusses solutions offered by technologies, and reports on case studies carried out in different countries. Chapters are based on selected contributions to the 18th International Symposium on Occupational Safety and Hygiene (SHO 2022), held on September 8-9, 2022, in Porto, Portugal. By reporting on different perspectives, such as the ones from managers, workers and OSH professionals, and covering timely issues, such as implications of telework ,issues related to gender inequality and applications of machine learning techniques in occupational health, this book offers extensive information and a source of inspiration to OSH researchers, practitioners and organizations operating in both local and global contexts.

The objective of the book is to provide materials to demonstrate the development of TOPSIS and to serve as a handbook. It contains the basic process of TOPSIS, numerous variant processes, property explanations, theoretical developments, and illustrative examples with real-world cases. Possible readers would be graduate students, researchers, analysts, and professionals who are interested in TOPSIS, a distance-based algorithm, and who would like to compare TOPSIS with other MCDM methods. The book serves as a research reference as well as a self-learning book with step-by-step illustrations for the MCDM community.

The book focuses on analysis and design for positive stochastic jump systems. By using multiple linear co-positive Lyapunov function method and linear programming technique, a basic theoretical framework is formed toward the issues of analysis and design for positive stochastic jump systems. This is achieved by providing an in-depth study on several major topics such as stability, time delay, finite-time control, observer design, filter design, and fault detection for positive stochastic jump systems. The comprehensive and systematic treatment of positive systems is one of the major features of the book, which is particularly suited for readers who are interested to learn non-negative theory. By reading this book, the reader can obtain the most advanced analysis and design techniques for positive stochastic jump systems.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase the speed and accuracy of financial decision-making, making it an increasingly important tool for financial professionals. One way that AI can improve efficiency in finance is by automating tasks and processes that are time-consuming and repetitive for humans. For example, AI algorithms can be used to analyze and process large amounts of data, such as financial statements and market data, in a fraction of the time that it would take a human to do so. This can allow financial professionals to focus on higher-value tasks, such as interpreting data and making strategic decisions, rather than being bogged down by mundane tasks. AI can also reduce costs in finance by increasing automation and eliminating the need for certain tasks to be performed manually. This can result in cost savings for financial institutions, which can then be passed on to customers in the form of lower fees or better services. AI can be used to identify unusual patterns of activity that may indicate fraudulent behavior. This can help financial institutions reduce losses from fraud and improve customer security. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can help financial institutions provide faster, more efficient customer service, particularly when it comes to answering common questions and handling routine tasks. Some financial institutions are using AI to analyze market data and make trades in real-time. AI-powered trading algorithms can potentially make faster and more accurate trading decisions than humans. In terms of speed and accuracy, AI algorithms can analyze data and make decisions much faster than humans, and can do so with a high degree of accuracy. This can be particularly useful in fast-moving financial markets, where quick and accurate decision-making can be the difference between success and failure.This book highlights how AI in finance can improve efficiency,reduce costs, and increase the speed and accuracy of financial decision-making. Moreover, the book also focuses on how to ensure the responsible and ethical use of AI in finance.This book is a valuable resource for students, scholars, academicians, researchers, professionals, executives, government agencies, and policymakers interested in exploring the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in finance. Its goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of the latest research and knowledge in this area, and to stimulate further inquiry and exploration.

This book intends to provide a reference manual to assist professionals and academics on further insights regarding: the impact of digital technologies in business, how to implement digital technologies, solutions for specific digital technologies barriers, and much more. Digital transformation marks a rethinking of how an organization uses technology, people, and processes in pursuit of new business models and new revenue streams, driven by changes in customer expectations around products and services. For many enterprises that build traditional goods, this means building digital products, such as a mobile applications or an ecommerce platform. To do so, they must use and integrate digital technologies. The pace of change is increasing. Organizations need to adapt or risk to disappear under innovators entrance in the market. With new digital technologies growing in an exponential rate in the last few decades, organizations are facing even more complex contexts. Managers are now pressed to take efficient decisions. The editors encourage the use of research methods such as Systematic Literature Review (SLR) or Multivocal Literature Review (MLR) (since many new technologies are usually evolved first by practitioners). However, other research methods can also be appreciated as case studies or experiments.

This book, dedicated to Professor Georgi M. Dimirovski on his anniversary, contains new research directions, challenges, and many relevant applications related to many aspects within the broadly perceived areas of systems and control, including signal analysis and intelligent systems. The project comprises two volumes with papers written by well known and very active researchers and practitioners. The first volume is focused on more foundational aspects related to general issues in systems science and mathematical systems, various problems in control and automation, and the use of computational and artificial intelligence in the context of systems modeling and control. The second volume is concerned with a presentation of relevant applications, notably in robotics, computer networks, telecommunication, fault detection/diagnosis, as well as in biology and medicine, and economic, financial, and social systems too.

This book focuses on open issues of Society 5.0, a new paradigm of a society, that balances a human-centred approach and technologies based on cyber-physical systems and artificial intelligence. The book contains results of how intelligent or cyber-solutions help to improve the quality of life in society despite new challenges. This book includes five sections. Section Society 5.0: Biomedicine and Healthcare present how cyber-physical systems help in healthcare, e.g. analysis of clinical data in pregnant women with hypertension, breast cancer diagnostics, healthy diet design and others. In the chapter, the problem of data analysis and optimization is considered. The second Section, Society 5.0: Human-centric Cyber-Solutions highlight new findings on constructing virtual reality simulators, training of workers on the basis of equipment's digital twins, development of human capital. Society 5.0: Socio-Economic Systems Modelling includes chapters concerning the application of quantum-like mathematical models for the analysis of socio-economic systems, indicative planning models for agriculture, approaches of assessing and monitoring competitiveness risks of regions. A section, Society 5.0: Industrial Cyber-Solutions provides new results on cyber-physical systems of Russian oil market, railway joint diagnostics, and information support for maintenance and repair of a machine-building cyber-physical system. The last section, Society 5.0: Cyber-Solutions Security consider interoperability issues of security, the video conferencing, and scaling networks.This book is directed to researchers, practitioners, engineers, software developers, professors and students. We do hope the book will be useful for them.

High dimensional reference architectures presented here allows confronting and prevailing over the growing complexity of polytopic projects implementations.Such projects should be envisaged giving that conventional systems operations, equipments, methodologies or organizations will reach their limits for self-evolvability in high complexity conditions. Self-evolvable high complexity systems are based on high dimensional polytopic reference architectures.Polytope is the general term of the sequence: point, line, polygon, polyhedron and so on.The polytopic projects are targeting the artificiality, not only for materials where it is well known and applied, but also for biological, cognitive, intelligent and mathematical systems. The book highlights the polytopic projects basic similarity despite the noticeable difference as domains of application. The roads to follow and the algebra of changing roads are emphasized.The book is divided in 9 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the Polytopic Roadmap to 4D and beyond. The role for the dialogue of processes in duality of the non-Aristotelian Logic of Contradiction and of Included Middle is emphasized for different domains. Chapter 2 refers to chemical systems. Supramolecular chemistry, metal organic frameworks, MOF, and reaction networks, are the examples considered in the frame of polytopic chemistry. Chapter 3 refers to biological systems. Biological dynamical hierarchies and quasi-species are the considered case studies. Technological and scientific projects targeting artificiality for cells and viruses are considered. Chapter 4 refers to cognitive systems. Developmental stages, formal and relational concepts analysis, and neural coding are considered here. The roles of the 4D systems of systems of systems and of conceptual 4D-cube are emphasized. Artificiality for cognitive systems is the object of study.Chapter 5 refers to mathematical systems. Modeling levels and the 4D digital twins are discussed. Hopf monoids as tools for the study of combinations and separations, dual graded graphs and V-models are informally presented. Chapter 6 refers to application of formal concept analysis, FCA, for high dimensional separations, nesting and drug delivery. Chapter 7 refers to polytopic engineering systems as multiscale transfer, distributors-collectors, cyclic operations, middle vessel columns, mixing, assembly and designs. Equipments have been characterized using Polytopic Roadmaps and classified by Periodic Tables. Chapter 8 introduces polytopic industry, economy, society and sustainability. Chapter 9 outlines new domains of interest as arts and architecture, transdisciplinarity, complex systems and unity of sciences and engineering.Polytopic Roadmaps are proposed as Method for experts from various fields to synthesize their thinking and capabilities into new projects implementation to face and surpass high complexity. A repetitive finding of this book is that self-evolvability observed in physical systems is based on the same directed sequence of reference architectures as the self-evolvability of concepts in our mind. Continuing to develop the field of self-evolvable systems and presenting the polytopic roadmaps for 4D and beyond advances in ever growing complexity domains, the book will be useful to engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs and students in different branches of production, complex systems sciences and engineering, ecology and applied mathematics.

In this book, we study decision trees for fault diagnosis in circuits and switching networks, which are among the most fundamental models for computing Boolean functions. We consider two main cases: when the scheme (circuit or switching network) has the same mode of operation for both calculation and diagnostics, and when the scheme has two modes of operation¿normal for calculation and special for diagnostics. In the former case, we get mostly negative results, including superpolynomial lower bounds on the minimum depth of diagnostic decision trees depending on scheme complexity and the NP-hardness of construction diagnostic decision trees. In the latter case, we describe classes of schemes and types of faults for which decision trees can be effectively used to diagnose schemes, when they are transformed into so-called iteration-free schemes.The tools and results discussed in this book help to understand both the possibilities and challenges of using decision trees to diagnosefaults in various schemes. The book is useful to specialists both in the field of theoretical and technical diagnostics.It can also be used for the creation of courses for graduate students.

The book consists of 8 parts: Energy Informatics, Electric Power Engineering, Heat Power Engineering, Nuclear Power Engineering, Renewable Power Engineering, Fuels, Transport, and Environmental Safety. The results presented in this book are aimed at solving some of the technical issues proposed by the Ukraine Recovery Plan and other important scientific and applied problems in the field of energy. Scientists from leading Ukrainian academic institutions and universities are working on this book.This book is for scientists, researchers, engineers, as well as lecturers and postgraduates of higher education institutions dealing with energy sector, power systems, ecological safety, etc.

This book aims to familiarize with the basics of the SEMS theory, including logical-probabilistic and logical-linguistic methods for their design and modeling, taking into account the incomplete certainty of the operating environment and the mental characteristics of the members of the human¿machine systems collective. Smart electromechanical systems (SEMS) are used in cyber-physical systems (CPS). The main tasks in the field of theory and practice of CPS are to ensure the efficiency, reliability and safety of operation in real time.SEMS have been widely used since 2000 in parallel robots or so-called parallel kinematic machines. They offer good opportunities in terms of precision, rigidity and the ability to handle heavy loads. SEMS are used in unmanned vehicles, astronomy, machine tools, medicine and other fields.Currently, much attention is paid to the methods of designing and modeling SEMS based on the principles of adaptability, intelligence, biomorphism of parallel kinematics and parallelism in information processing and control calculations. The book consists of four parts:- Mechanisms and control systems;- The central nervous system;- Group control;- Examples of using SEMS modules.The book is recommended for specialists in the field of control, as well as a textbook for masters of universities specializing in the field of smart electromechanical systems and robotics and includes many scientific fields such as kinematics, dynamics and control theory.

This book proposes analysis and design techniques for Markov jump systems (MJSs) using Lyapunov function and sliding mode control techniques. It covers a range of topics including stochastic stability, finite-time boundedness, actuator-fault problem, bumpless transfer scheme, and adaptive sliding mode fault-tolerant control for uncertain MJSs. Notably, the book presents a new model for deception attacks (DAs), establishing the correlation between attacks and time delays, which should be of particular interest due to the recent increase in such attacks. The book's content is presented in a comprehensive, progressive manner, with fundamental principles introduced first before addressing more advanced techniques. The book features illustrations and tables, providing readers with a practical and intuitive approach to applying these methods in their own research. This book will prove invaluable to researchers and graduate students in control engineering and applied mathematics with an interest in the latest developments in MJSs.

This book aims at bringing together global researchers to generate thought on how this transition from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 could make a difference to the globe for larger good. The collaboration and interaction between man and machine has given rise to Industry 5.0. With the prime objective of Industry 5.0 to create a benefit for the human beings while tapping on to the advantage of Industry 4.0, in no case, does it replace what has already been achieved. In fact, it brings to light what can be done in order to make life better. While Industry 4.0 offered extraordinary technological advancement, Industry 5.0 reasons out that technology alone is not sufficient to answer everything or provide a solution, but it is an amalgamation of both machine and human interaction to create that difference. In fact, with the impact of widespread digitalization that has led to dehumanization of the industrial makeup, the interest of global researchers has increased toward mapping how the humancreativity and brainpower can be reconciled with the intelligent systems that can enhance process efficiency.Industry 5.0 has touched upon some of those key domains which are of much concern and debate globally including resilience (both business and cyber), environment and sustainability, diversity and inclusion, values and ethics, vision and purpose, circular economy, understanding the human¿machine collaboration and the ¿human-touch¿ in the production process.This transition that has taken place in moving from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 has essentially created a need to pay cognizance to the role of ¿human¿ in the process which creates an enhanced focus toward the right kind of skills and competencies, identification of training and developmental needs, talent acquisition and management, safety and wellbeing, future of work as well as hybrid working models.Undeniably, the pace with which Industry 4.0 has been accelerating has bypassed the first three industrial revolutions, which is definitely a consequence of the fast introduction of new and cutting-edge technologies. While organizations are already in analyzing the context, mapping this transition and the flow of activities from Industry 4.0 to 5.0 is gaining attention as Industry 4.0 lacked personalization and customization. This co-existence of man and machine creates a pathway for newer prospects and opportunities to emerge and expand possibilities of personalization with the empowerment of ¿human¿ in the production process.This lays the foundation for this book. This book adopts a forward-looking approach by bringing in research and contributions that facilitate in mapping the consereasons, consequences and solutions for ¿man+machine¿ across industries. This book serves as a guide not just to academia but also to the industry to adopt suitable strategies that offer insights into global best practices as well as the innovations in the domain.

This book describes state-of-the-art economic ideas and how these ideas can be (and are) used to make economic decision (in particular, to optimally allocate assets) and to gauge the results of different economic decisions (in particular, by using optimal transport methods). Special emphasis is paid to machine learning techniques (including deep learning) and to different aspects of quantum econometrics-when quantum physics and quantum computing models are techniques are applied to study economic phenomena. Applications range from more traditional economic areas to more non-traditional topics such as economic aspects of tourism, cryptocurrencies, telecommunication infrastructure, and pandemic. This book helps student to learn new techniques, practitioners to become better knowledgeable of the state-of-the-art econometric techniques, and researchers to further develop these important research directions 

This book is devoted to the study of engineering and control technologies for the cyber-physical systems development. This book defines the approaches in the engineering leverage the exploitation of artificial intelligence and most urgent computing methods. The authors study the activities allows for the developing new and perspective concepts of robotics systems combining various machine learning methods, uncertainty explanation approaches, computer vision and unmanned aerial systems control technologies including artificial neural networks and simulation modeling by addressing a large scale of applications. The book also describes new materials engineering as well as implementation of these technologies in the different domains such as polymeric film production, polymer composition, and roller squeezing of leather, in order to realize the novel cyber-physical systems, their functionalities, and features. The authors describe the development of method for increasing the software efficiency, considering the increasing complexity of the computing systems and the importance of ensuring accuracy and velocity of modelling. The book also analyses algorithms for fuzzy models and systems, including the cyber-physical real-time systems, and non-stationary object with discrete time. The authors highlight the problem of ensuring the quality on engineering technologies for cyber-physical systems as the most important and consider different approaches to its solution.

Advanced manufacturing via computer numerical machining is the art of producing mechanical components employed in aerospace, automobile, and industrial applications where a high level of accuracy is needed. This book focuses on the nano-machining of aluminum alloy and its optimization. The application of aluminum alloy in the manufacturing industry has increased tremendously due to its lightweight to high strength ratio and high-level resistance to corrosion. However, aluminum alloy has some challenges during the machining and manufacturing stage in order to solve real-life manufacturing challenges in advanced machining operation for sustainable production processes. Therefore, it is a need for the implementation of a general algebraic modeling system (GAMS) and other metaheuristic techniques for problem solving and to effectively develop mathematical models for high accuracy prediction and optimization under nano-lubrication machining conditions. This book discusses majorly on themajor three responses in machining such as surface roughness, cutting force, and material removal rate, which will give an excellent guide to undergraduate and postgraduate students, senior research fellows in academia, operational, and strategic staff in manufacturing industries.

The book aims to deal with the main advances in the study of artificial intelligence, the digital and circular economy, and innovation from a multidisciplinary perspective.Whoever governs the artificial intelligence will hold the keys to the world and the future. This book explains the growing role of artificial intelligence in our lives and the need to understand its mechanisms.The book presents original research articles addressing various aspects of artificial intelligence applied to economics, law, management, and optimization. The topics discussed include economics, territorial policies, law, resource allocation strategies, information technology, and learning for inclusion.Combining the input of contributing professors and researchers from Italian and other foreign universities, the book is of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners, as well as members of the public in general, interested in the world of the artificial intelligence and economics.

Networked switched system has emerged as an essential system model in the field of control due to its accurate reflection of the wide-area distribution and typical switching characteristics of increasingly sophisticated controlled objects in engineering practice. The openness of communication networks, the limitation of communication resources, and the complexity of switching behaviors make it a challenging task to ensure the steady-state and transient performance of the output regulation of networked switched systems. This book proposes several novel methodologies for output regulation of networked switched systems from the perspective of both steady-state and transient performance. The core features of our approaches are fourfold: i) Without imposing stability requirements on individual subsystems and all switching instants, a series of innovative dwell-time switching technologies are established to handle the issue of output regulation for networked switched systems with severely unstable dynamics under event-triggering strategies in the presence of cyber attacks. ii) Taking into account switching rules and cyber attack parameters within the event-triggered control framework, event detection conditions, modal matching conditions, and event waiting conditions are constructed, and a series of new event-triggering mechanisms are proposed to effectively enhance network resource utilization and secure steady-state performance of networked switched systems. iii) Typical cyber attacks have unique consequences on the secure steady-state performance of networked switched systems with severely unstable dynamics due to the short activation time of a single subsystem and the necessity to relay the switching signal through the network. To this purpose, the consecutive asynchronous switching behaviors of the subsystem or controller resulting from a long-duration DoS attack or an integrity deception attack incorporating switching signal tampering are investigated. iv) To deal with the transient performance fluctuations of the closed-loop system caused by factors such as mismatch switching between the subsystem and the corresponding controller, data update at event-triggering instants, cyber attack blocking and tampering of transmitted data, etc., bumpless transfer control strategies are formulated in the interpolation type and multi-source type, balancing the transient and steady-state performances of the output regulation of networked switched systems. This book presents these topics in a systematic way, which is of tremendous importance to both theoretical research and practical applications involving switched systems.

This book reviews and presents several approaches to advanced decision-making models for safety and risk assessment. Each introduced model provides case studies indicating a high level of efficiency, robustness, and applicability, which allow readers to utilize them in their understudy risk-based assessment applications.The book begins by introducing a novel dynamic DEMATEL for improving safety management systems. It then progresses logically, dedicating a chapter to each approach, including advanced FMEA with probabilistic linguistic preference relations, Bayesian Network approach and interval type-2 fuzzy set, advanced TOPSIS with spherical fuzzy set, and advanced BWM with neutrosophic fuzzy set and evidence theory.This book will be of interest to professionals and researchers working in the field of system safety and reliability and postgraduate and undergraduate students studying applications of decision-making tools and expert systems.

This book involves ideas/results from the topics of mathematical, information, and data sciences, in connection with the main research interests of Professor Pardo that can be summarized as Information Theory with Applications to Statistical Inference. This book is a tribute to Professor Leandro Pardo, who has chaired the Department of Statistics and OR of the Complutense University in Madrid, and he has been also President of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research.  In this way, the contributions have been structured into three parts, which often overlap to a greater or lesser extent, namely Trends in Mathematical Sciences (Part I) Trends in Information Sciences (Part II) Trends in Data Sciences (Part III) The contributions gathered in this book have offered either new developments from a theoretical and/or computational and/or applied point of view, or reviews of recent literature of outstanding developments. They have been applied through nice examples in climatology, chemistry, economics, engineering, geology, health sciences, physics, pandemics, and socioeconomic indicators. Consequently, the intended audience of this book is mainly statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, and so on, but users of these disciplines as well as experts in the involved applications may certainly find this book a very interesting read.

Although there is much literature on organisational learning, mathematical formalisation and computational simulation, there is no literature that uses mathematical modelling and simulation to represent and explore different facets of multilevel learning. This book provides an overview of recent work on mathematical formalisation and computational simulation of multilevel organisational learning by exploiting the possibilities of self-modeling network models to address it. This is the first book addressing mathematical formalisation and computational modeling of multilevel organisational learning in a systematic, principled manner. A self-modeling network modeling approach from AI and Network Science is used where in a reflective manner some of the network nodes (called self-model nodes) represent parts of the network¿s own network structure characteristics. This is supported by a dedicated software environment allowing to design and implement (higher-order) adaptive network models by specifying them in a conceptual manner at a high level of abstraction in a standard table format, without any need of algorithmic specification or programming. This modeling approach allows to model the development of knowledge in an organisational setting in a neatly structured manner at three different levels for the usage, adaptation and control, respectively, of the underlying mental models. Several examples of realistic cases of multilevel organisational learning are used to illustrate the approach. Crucial concepts such as the aggregation of mental models to form shared mental models out of individual mental models are addressed extensively. It is shown how to model context-sensitive control of organisational learning taking into account a wide variety of context factors, for example relating to levels of expertise of individuals or to leadership styles of managers involved. Mathematical equilibrium analysis of models of organisational learning is also addressed, among others allowing verification of correctness of the implemental models in comparison to their conceptual design. Chapters in this book also contribute to the Management and Business Sciences research by demonstrating how computational modeling can be used to capture complex management phenomena such as multilevel organizational learning. This book has a potential implication for practice by demonstrating how computational modeling can be used to capture learning scenarios, which then provide a basis for more informed managerial decisions.

From the start of life, people used their brains to make something better in design in ordinary works. Due to that, metaheuristics are essential to living things, and several inspirations from life have been used in the generation of new algorithms. These algorithms have unique features, but the usage of different features of different algorithms may give more effective optimum results in means of precision in optimum results, computational effort, and convergence. This book is a timely book to summarize the latest developments in the optimization of structural engineering systems covering all classical approaches and new trends including hybrids metaheuristic algorithms. Also, artificial intelligence and machine learning methods are included to predict optimum results by skipping long optimization processes. The main objective of this book is to introduce the fundamentals and current development of methods and their applications in structural engineering.

This book presents the latest advances and emerging trends in research and industrial applications in non-destructive testing, manufacturing and process safety and diagnostics and materials science. With technological advances, the modern world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution, being in the stage of digital transformation, when innovations from different industries interpenetrate and complement each other. The School of Non-Destructive Testing, Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia, promotes scientific research and industrial application of non-destructive testing and materials science technologies and related tests, as well as methods, to ensure safe manufacturing processes.Today, research and technology advancement is driven by innovations, and there is a need for publications to stimulate the formation and continuous training of specialists in non-destructive testing, materials science and safety. This book can be used as a complementary technical document to upgrade the skills of specialists in non-destructive testing, materials science and safety, and as a primary resource for training managers and decision-makers in various industries.Innovations in the fields of non-destructive testing, production and process safety, diagnostics and materials science and books that highlight the best and instructive are central to our technological world.I am pleased to see this comprehensive book taking shape and advancing this field to the next generation of scientists seeking for new research opportunities.