David W. Russell – författare

Good Risks is a fascinating insight into ORIX, a global giant whose business empire straddles the world, but which has managed to remain out of the media spotlight for half a century. Award winning author David Russell explains how this Japanese company has transcended its national identity to become a global player, and what that means for everyone else. In a series of one-on-one interviews with senior executives at ORIX companies around the world, readers gain a firsthand glimpse of the inner workings of this "invisible" corporate group that controls hundreds of billions of dollars. Interviews with the company President and Chairman in Tokyo provide rare insight into the thought leaders at the highest levels, and a contribution by the Chairman himself discusses the hard realities of globalization and the keys to success in the coming decade.

The key concept that is lost in the Japan vs. China vs. US vs. EU battle is that the business landscape has changed drastically, making national boundaries anachronistic. Companies such as IBM, Disney, Apple, and Microsoft long ago stopped being "American" firms; they are global competitors that take advantage of their deep knowledge of the US markets, but have no special allegiance to the United States. This book argues that this is the future of all large-scale business, as already exemplified by ORIX.

The business scene unfolding today is not "international" or "multinational", but an increasingly unified, global battleground. The rise of ORIX charts the future of business, and Good Risks provides the details and insights business leaders need to anticipate tomorrow''s changes.

Good Risks is a fascinating insight into ORIX, a global giant whose business empire straddles the world, but which has managed to remain out of the media spotlight for half a century. Award winning author David Russell explains how this Japanese company has transcended its national identity to become a global player, and what that means for everyone else. In a series of one-on-one interviews with senior executives at ORIX companies around the world, readers gain a firsthand glimpse of the inner workings of this "invisible" corporate group that controls hundreds of billions of dollars. Interviews with the company President and Chairman in Tokyo provide rare insight into the thought leaders at the highest levels, and a contribution by the Chairman himself discusses the hard realities of globalization and the keys to success in the coming decade.

The key concept that is lost in the Japan vs. China vs. US vs. EU battle is that the business landscape has changed drastically, making national boundaries anachronistic. Companies such as IBM, Disney, Apple, and Microsoft long ago stopped being "American" firms; they are global competitors that take advantage of their deep knowledge of the US markets, but have no special allegiance to the United States. This book argues that this is the future of all large-scale business, as already exemplified by ORIX.

The business scene unfolding today is not "international" or "multinational", but an increasingly unified, global battleground. The rise of ORIX charts the future of business, and Good Risks provides the details and insights business leaders need to anticipate tomorrow''s changes.

Mechatronics in Action’s case-study approach provides the most effective means of illustrating how mechatronics can make products and systems more flexible, more responsive and possess higher levels of functionality than would otherwise be possible. The series of case studies serves to illustrate how a mechatronic approach has been used to achieve enhanced performance through the transfer of functionality from the mechanical domain to electronics and software.

Mechatronics in Action not only provides readers with access to a range of case studies, and the experts’ view of these, but also offers case studies in course design and development to support tutors in making the best and most effective use of the technical coverage provided. It provides, in an easily accessible form, a means of increasing the understanding of the mechatronic concept, while giving both students and tutors substantial technical insight into how this concept has been developed and used.

Robust control mechanisms customarily require knowledge of the system’s describing equations which may be of the high order differential type.  In order to produce these equations, mathematical models can often be derived and correlated with measured dynamic behavior.  There are two flaws in this approach one is the level of inexactness introduced by linearizations and the other when no model is apparent.  Several years ago a new genre of control systems came to light that are much less dependent on differential models such as fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms. Both of these soft computing solutions require quite considerable a priori system knowledge to create a control scheme and sometimes complicated training program before they can be implemented in a real world dynamic system.

Michie and Chambers’ BOXES methodology created a black box system that was designed to control a mechanically unstable system with very little a priori system knowledge, linearization or approximation.  All the method needed was some notion of maximum and minimum values for the state variables and a set of boundaries that divided each variable into an integer state number.  The BOXES Methodology applies the method to a variety of systems including continuous and chaotic dynamic systems, and discusses how it may be possible to create a generic control method that is self organizing and adaptive that learns with the assistance of near neighbouring states.

The BOXES Methodology introduces students at the undergraduate and master’s level to black box dynamic system control , and gives lecturers access to background materials that can be used in their courses in support of student research and classroom presentations in novel control systems and real-time applications of artificial intelligence. Designersare provided with a novel method of optimization and controller design when the equations of a system are difficult or unknown. Researchers interested in artificial intelligence (AI) research and models of the brain and practitioners from other areas of biology and technology are given an insight into how AI software can be written and adapted to operate in real-time.

This book focuses on how the BOXES Methodology, which is based on the work of Donald Michie, is applied to ill-defined real-time control systems with minimal a priori knowledge of the system. The method is applied to a variety of systems including the familiar pole and cart. This second edition includes a new section that covers some further observations and thoughts, problems, and evolutionary extensions that the reader will find useful in their own implementation of the method. 

This second edition includes a new section on how to handle jittering about a system boundary which in turn causes replicated run times to become part of the learning mechanism. It also addresses the aging of data values using a forgetfulness factor that causes wrong values of merit to be calculated. Another question that is addressed is “Should a BOXES cell ever be considered fully trained and, if so, excluded from further dynamic updates”. Finally, it expands on how system boundaries may be shifted using data from many runs using an evolutionary paradigm.