The application areas of batteries are currently booming. The recent generation of devices combines a high energy density with a reasonable cost and life expectancy, making them suitable not only for cars but also electric bikes, scooters, forklifts, gardening and household tools, storage batteries as well as airborne applications such as drones, helicopters, and small airplanes.

Batteries are of vital importance for storing intermittent renewable energy for stationary and mobile applications. In order to charge the battery and maintain its capacity, the states of the battery - such as the current charge, safety and health, but also quantities that cannot be measured directly - need to be known to the battery management system. State estimation estimates the electrical state of a system by eliminating inaccuracies and errors from measurement data. Numerous methods and techniques are used for lithium-ion and other batteries. The various battery models seek to simplify the circuitry used in the battery management system.

Cycling is an important part of the urban transport system and short-distance travel in many modern cities around the world. With no emissions and occupying much less road space than cars, bikes are clean and sustainable. Bicycle traffic needs to be tracked and analysed in order to generate reliable predictions and make correct decisions when adapting and building traffic infrastructure, to account for bikes in road traffic systems, and to model and plan interactions between bikes and autonomous vehicles.

Bifacial photovoltaic (PV) modules are able to utilize light from both sides and can therefore significantly increase the electric yield of PV power plants, thus reducing the cost and improving profitability. Bifacial PV technology has a huge potential to reach a major market share, in particular when considering utility scale PV plants. Accordingly, bifacial PV is currently attracting increasing attention from involved engineers, scientists and investors.

Big Data Analytics and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are helping to drive the management of data and usage of the extraordinary increase of computer processing power provided by Cloud Data Centres (CDCs). SDN helps CDCs run their services more efficiently by enabling managers to configure, manage, secure, and optimize the network resources very quickly. Big-Data Analytics in turn has entered CDCs to harvest the massive computing powers and deduct information that was never reachable by conventional methods.

First designed to generate personalized recommendations to users in the 90s, recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to users’ data to suggest information, products, and services that best match their preferences. In recent decades, we have seen an exponential increase in the volumes of data, which has introduced many new challenges.

First designed to generate personalized recommendations to users in the 90s, recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to users’ data to suggest information, products, and services that best match their preferences. In recent decades, we have seen an exponential increase in the volumes of data, which has introduced many new challenges.

This timely volume combines experimental and theoretical research on big data recommender systems to help computer scientists develop new concepts and methodologies for complex applications. It includes original scientific contributions in the form of theoretical foundations, comparative analysis, surveys, case studies, techniques and tools. The authors give special attention to key topics such as data filtering and cleaning techniques for recommendations, novelty and diversity, privacy issues, security threats and their mitigation, trust, cold start, sparsity, scalability, application domains, and recommender system evaluations.

The fields of Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) have seen tremendous advances, developments, and growth in recent years. The IoT is the inter-networking of connected smart devices, buildings, vehicles and other items which are embedded with electronics, software, sensors and actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data. The IoT produces a lot of data. Big data describes very large and complex data sets that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with, and the use of analytical methods to extract value from data. This edited book covers analytical techniques for handling the huge amount of data generated by the Internet of Things, from architectures and platforms to security and privacy issues, applications, and challenges as well as future directions.

Bioelectromagnetics in Healthcare: Advanced sensing and communication applications is a collection of twelve invited chapters from international experts from the UK, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States of America. The book forms a cohesive architecture that covers the state-of-the-art in terms of sensing and communications with relevance to bioelectromagnetics in healthcare. The book provides a valuable insight into the current and future possibilities where electromagnetics engineers will need to keep improving radiofrequency device performance in terms of better efficiency, greater sensitivity, reduced unintended power absorption by the body, smaller size, and lower power consumption.

Nature presents examples of active sensing which are unique, sophisticated and incredibly fascinating. There are animals that sense the environment actively, for example through echolocation, which have evolved their capabilities over millions of years and that, as a result of evolution, have developed unique in-built sensing mechanisms that are often the envy of synthetic systems.

Nanomaterials are able to penetrate nanoscale pores of tissues, possess prolonged circulation, enter cells, and have increased surface area per volume allowing for greater drug loading. For these reasons, nanomaterials are finding numerous uses in medicine including fighting cancer, promoting tissue regeneration, reversing aging, inhibiting infection, limiting inflammation or scar tissue growth, and many others.

This is the only English language book on bistatic radar. It starts with James Casper's fine chapter in the first edition of Skolnik's Radar Handbook (1970), capturing previously unpublished work before 1970. It then summarizes and codifies subsequent bistatic radar research and development, especially as catalogued in the special December 1986 IEE journal. It defines and resolves many issues and controversies plaguing bistatic radar, including predicted performance, monostatic equivalence, bistatic radar cross section and resolution, bistatic Doppler, hitchhiking, SAR, ECM/ECCM, and, most importantly, the utility of bistatic radars. The text provides a history of bistatic systems that points out to potential designers, the applications that have worked and the dead-ends not worth pursuing. The text reviews the basic concepts and definitions, and explains the mathematical development of relationships, such as geometry, Ovals of Cassini, dynamic range, isorange and isodoppler contours, target doppler, and clutter doppler spread.

Blockchain and machine learning technologies can mitigate healthcare issues such as slow access to medical data, poor system interoperability, lack of patient agency, and data quality and quantity for medical research. Blockchain technology facilitates and secures the storage of information in such a way that doctors can see a patient's entire medical history, but researchers see only statistical data instead of any personal information. Machine learning can make use of this data to notice patterns and give accurate predictions, providing more support for the patients and also in research related fields where there is a need for accurate data to predict credible results.

A secured system for Healthcare 4.0 is vital to all stakeholders, including patients and caregivers. Using the new Blockchain system of trusted ledgers would help guarantee authenticity in the multi-access system that is Healthcare 4.0. This is the first comprehensive book that explores how to achieve secure systems for Healthcare 4.0 using Blockchain, with emphasis on the key challenges of privacy and security.

Blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions duplicated and distributed across an entire network of computer systems on the blockchain which makes it more difficult to hack or tamper with. The popularity of blockchain has been increasing with the growth of social media and the internet of things (IoT). Social media are interactive digitally mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing and exchange of information, ideas, opinions and interests via virtual communities and social network platforms. However, unmonitored social accounts can be the target of hackers who post fraudulent messages or virus-infected links that spread to contacts and followers, and "employee weakness" is responsible for 20% of cyberattacks in companies. So, it has become essential to secure both personal and professional social media networks, accounts and data.

Smart grids with distributed clean energy generation, storage and prosumers are the future of energy systems. They need two-way digital communication between multiple customers and suppliers of energy, to produce, buy and sell electricity to the grid at small scales. These arrangements need a system that maintains, checks, and registers information about transactions.

The healthcare arena has seen a shift in recent years, with more healthcare provisions being delivered or managed via electronic means. Healthcare providers can now provide patients with diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, or a prescription without ever sharing the same physical space. With so much more patient data now stored and accessed electronically, the security of this information is ever more critical to the delivery of effective and efficient healthcare services. As blockchains are resistant to modification of their data, blockchain technology therefore provides traceable and reliable security to e-Healthcare systems and services.

Blockchain technology is a powerful, cost-effective method for network security. Essentially, it is a decentralized ledger for storing all committed transactions in trustless environments by integrating several core technologies such as cryptographic hash, digital signature and distributed consensus mechanisms.

On 2 November 1936 the world's first high definition television station was inaugurated at Alexandra Palace. Two competing companies, Marconi-EMI Television Company Ltd and Baird Television Ltd, provided studio and transmitting equipment for the new service which operated, on an alternate basis, with the systems of the two companies. After a trial period the 405-line system of the Marconi-EMI company was adopted and the last transmission by the 240-line system of Baird Television Ltd was sent out on 30 January 1937.

This book explores some of the technological challenges in the application of digital communications technology in the home, including provision of fast, 'always on' internet connections. It looks at the ways consumers will use broadband access and what the key applications will be for provider and consumer. More broadly it aims to describe how communication to and within the home is evolving, and how people's lives are changing as they take advantage of the new technology and its applications.

This book provides the engineer and manager with a very good understanding of the processes needed to effectively perform the system design for broadband communication systems and home networking approaches. It is ideal for all engineers that design and analyze wireless, spread spectrum and basic broadband communication systems and are involved with the design of basic networking systems. It provides a good intuitive approach starting from basic telephony to satellite communications.