
This open access book offers a summary of the development of Digital Earth over the past twenty years. By reviewing the initial vision of Digital Earth, the evolution of that vision, the relevant key technologies, and the role of Digital Earth in helping people respond to global challenges, this publication reveals how and why Digital Earth is becoming vital for acquiring, processing, analysing…

This open access book assesses the potential of data-driven methods in industrial process monitoring engineering. The process modeling, fault detection, classification, isolation, and reasoning are studied in detail. These methods can be used to improve the safety and reliability of industrial processes. Fault diagnosis, including fault detection and reasoning, has attracted engineers and scien…

This open access book attempts to provide a perspective on the circularity assessment at different levels of the systemic hierarchy and advocates better resource management for a sustainable future. It demonstrates how relevant circularity indicators are used for quantifying the extent of circularity of each level. Illustrative case studies that discuss the process of quantitatively interpretin…

Creativity is a difficult concept, how can it best be defined, understood, applied, and practiced? This book provides important answers to these questions. Technology can enable artists to be more creative. Scientific and artistic thinking give us two complementary tools to understand the complexity of the world, with science reducing subjective experience to essential principles and art i…

This open access book details the relationship between the artist and their created works, using tools such as information technology, computer environments, and interactive devices, for a range of information sources and application domains. This has produced new kinds of created works which can be viewed, explored, and interacted with, either as an installation or via a virtual environment s…

This open access book presents the proceedings of the 3rd Indo-German Conference on Sustainability in Engineering held at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, on September 16–17, 2019. Intended to foster the synergies between research and education, the conference is one of the joint activities of the BITS Pilani and TU Braunschweig conducted under the auspices of Indo-Ge…

We would like to dedicate this book to Professor Chris Pickvance, who passed away in autumn of 2021. As an urban sociologist and one of the first scholars to lead a comparative research project on housing movements in Central and Eastern Europe just after 1989, Chris has been a great inspiration for our work. He also generously commented on our draft manuscript as part of our advisory …

How can we learn to lead and think greener, smarter, and healthier in our daily work? This chapter considers the rise of visions and goals towards more sustainable organization for both business and society. The landmarks of tomorrow seem to be broadly affected by management ideas on sustainability—whether by deep or shallow thinking. What can various sustainability orientations mea…


This is the first Open Access book introducing more than 20 of Japan’s leading innovative entrepreneurs from the 17th century to the present. The author outlines the innovative business models created by entrepreneurs including SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo)’s Yanai Tadashi, Honda’s Soichiro Honda, Sony’s Akio Morita, Panasonic’s Konosuke Matsushita, and Toyota’…