Simula SpringerBriefs on Computing – serie

This open access book offers an initial introduction to programming for scientific and computational applications using the Python programming language. The presentation style is compact and example-based, making it suitable for students and researchers with little or no prior experience in programming. The book uses relevant examples from mathematics and the natural sciences to present programming as a practical toolbox that can quickly enable readers to write their own programs for data processing and mathematical modeling. These tools include file reading, plotting, simple text analysis, and using NumPy for numerical computations, which are fundamental building blocks of all programs in data science and computational science. At the same time, readers are introduced to the fundamental concepts of programming, including variables, functions, loops, classes, and object-oriented programming. Accordingly, the book provides a sound basis for further computer science and programming studies.

This open access volume presents a novel computational framework for understanding how collections of excitable cells work. The key approach in the text is to model excitable tissue by representing the individual cells constituting the tissue. This is in stark contrast to the common approach where homogenization is used to develop models where the cells are not explicitly present. The approach allows for very detailed analysis of small collections of excitable cells, but computational challenges limit the applicability in the presence of large collections of cells.

This open access book presents a set of basic techniques for estimating the benefit of IT development projects and portfolios. It also offers methods for monitoring how much of that estimated benefit is being achieved during projects.Readers can then use these benefit estimates together with cost estimates to create a benefit/cost index to help them decide which functionalities to send into construction and in what order. This allows them to focus on constructing the functionality that offers the best value for money at an early stage.Although benefits management involves a wide range of activities in addition to estimation and monitoring, the techniques in this book provides a clear guide to achieving what has always been the goal of project and portfolio stakeholders: developing systems that produce as much usefulness and value as possible for the money invested. The techniques can also help deal with vicarious motives and obstacles that prevent this happening. The book equips readers to recognize when a project budget should not be spent in full and resources be allocated elsewhere in a portfolio instead. It also provides development managers and upper management with common ground as a basis for making informed decisions.

This is an open access book.It offers comprehensive, self-contained knowledge on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), which is a very promising technology for achieving intelligence in the next-generation wireless communications and computing networks.The book starts with the basic concepts, key techniques and network architectures of MEC. Then, we present the wide applications of MEC, including edge caching, 6G networks, Internet of Vehicles, and UAVs. In the last part, we present new opportunities when MEC meets blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and distributed machine learning (e.g., federated learning). We also identify the emerging applications of MEC in pandemic, industrial Internet of Things and disaster management.The book allows an easy cross-reference owing to the broad coverage on both the principle and applications of MEC. The book is written for people interested in communications and computer networks at all levels. The primary audience includes senior undergraduates, postgraduates, educators, scientists, researchers, developers, engineers, innovators and research strategists.

This open access book bridges common tools in medical imaging and neuroscience with the numerical solution of brain modelling PDEs. The connection between these areas is established through the use of two existing tools, FreeSurfer and FEniCS, and one novel tool, the SVM-Tk, developed for this book. The reader will learn the basics of magnetic resonance imaging and quickly proceed to generating their first FEniCS brain meshes from T1-weighted images. The book's presentation concludes with the reader solving a simplified PDE model of gadobutrol diffusion in the brain that incorporates diffusion tensor images, of various resolution, and complex, multi-domain, variable-resolution FEniCS meshes with detailed markings of anatomical brain regions. After completing this book, the reader will have a solid foundation for performing patient-specific finite element simulations of biomechanical models of the human brain.

This open access volume compiles student reports from the 2021 Simula Summer School in Computational Physiology. Interested readers will find herein a number of modern approaches to modeling excitable tissue. This should provide a framework for tools available to model subcellular and tissue-level physiology across scales and scientific questions. In June through August of 2021, Simula held the seventh annual Summer School in Computational Physiology in collaboration with the University of Oslo (UiO) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The course focuses on modeling excitable tissues, with a special interest in cardiac physiology and neuroscience. The majority of the school consists of group research projects conducted by Masters and PhD students from around the world, and advised by scientists at Simula, UiO and UCSD. Each group then produced a report that addreses a specific problem of importance in physiology and presents a succinct summary of the findings. Reports may not necessarily represent new scientific results; rather, they can reproduce or supplement earlier computational studies or experimental findings.Reports from eight of the summer projects are included as separate chapters. The fields represented include cardiac geometry definition (Chapter 1), electrophysiology and pharmacology (Chapters 2–5), fluid mechanics in blood vessels (Chapter 6), cardiac calcium handling and mechanics (Chapter 7), and machine learning in cardiac electrophysiology (Chapter 8).

This open access book describes Smittestopp, the first Norwegian system for digital contact tracing of Covid-19 infections, which was developed in March and early April 2020. The system was deployed after five weeks of development and was active for a little more than two months, when a drop in infection levels in Norway and privacy concerns led to shutting it down.  The intention of this book is twofold.  First, it reports on the design choices made in the development phase.  Second, as one of the only systems in the world that collected population data into a central database and which was used for an entire population, we can share experience on how the design choices impacted the system's operation. By sharing lessons learned and the challenges faced during the development and deployment of the technology, we hope that this book can be a valuable guide for experts from different domains, such as big data collection and analysis, application development, and deployment in a national population, as well as digital tracing.

This open access volume compiles student reports from the 2022 Simula Summer School in Computational Physiology. The reports provide an overview of some tools available to model physiology in excitable tissues across scales and scientific questions.  In 2022, Simula held the eighth annual Summer School in Computational Physiology in collaboration with the University of Oslo (UiO) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Each year, the course focuses on modeling excitable tissues, with a special interest in cardiac physiology and neuroscience. Group research projects conducted by graduate students from around the world result in reports addressing problems of physiological importance. Reports may not necessarily represent new scientific results; rather, they can reproduce or supplement earlier studies.Reports from seven of the summer projects are included as separate chapters. The topics represented include multiscale mechanics, electrophysiology, pharmacology, and machine learning.

This open access text aims at giving you the simplest possible introduction to differential equations that are used in models of electrophysiology. It covers models at several spatial and temporal scales with associated numerical methods. The text demonstrates that a very limited number of fundamental techniques can be used to define numerical methods for equations ranging from ridiculously simple to extremely complex systems of partial differential equations. Every method is implemented in Matlab and the codes are freely available online. By using these codes, the reader becomes familiar with classical models of electrophysiology, like the cable equation, the monodomain model, and the bidomain model. But modern models that have just started to gain attention in the field of computational electrophysiology are also presented. If you just want to read one book, it should probably not be this one, but if you want a simple introduction to a complex field, it is worth considering the present text.

This open access volume explains the foundations of modern solvers for ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Formulating and solving ODEs is an essential part of mathematical modeling and computational science, and numerous solvers are available in commercial and open source software. However, no single ODE solver is the best choice for every single problem, and choosing the right solver requires fundamental insight into how the solvers work. This book will provide exactly that insight, to enable students and researchers to select the right solver for any ODE problem of interest, or implement their own solvers if needed. The presentation is compact and accessible, and focuses on the large and widely used class of solvers known as Runge-Kutta methods. Explicit and implicit methods are motivated and explained, as well as methods for error control and automatic time step selection, and all the solvers are implemented as a class hierarchy in Python.

This open access book offers comprehensive, self-contained knowledge on Digital Twin (DT), which is a very promising technology for achieving digital intelligence in the next-generation wireless communications and computing networks. DT is a key technology to connect physical systems and digital spaces in Metaverse.The objectives of this book are to provide the basic concepts of DT, to explore the promising applications of DT integrated with emerging technologies, and to give insights into the possible future directions of DT. For easy understanding, this book also presents several use cases for DT models and applications in different scenarios.The book starts with the basic concepts, models, and network architectures of DT. Then, we present the new opportunities when DT meets edge computing, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, anddistributed machine learning (e.g., federated learning, multi-agent deep reinforcement learning). We also present a wide application of DT as an enabling technology for 6G networks, Aerial-Ground Networks, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).The book allows an easy cross-reference owing to the broad coverage on both the principle and applications of DT. The book is written for people interested in communications and computer networks at all levels. The primary audience includes senior undergraduates, postgraduates, educators, scientists, researchers, developers, engineers, innovators and research strategists.

This open access volume compiles student reports from the 2023 Simula Summer School in Computational Physiology. The reports provide an overview of some tools available to model physiology in excitable tissues across scales and scientific questions.  In 2023, Simula held the nineth annual Summer School in Computational Physiology in collaboration with the University of Oslo (UiO) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Each year, the course focuses on modeling excitable tissues, with a special interest in cardiac physiology and neuroscience. Group research projects conducted by graduate students from around the world result in reports addressing problems of physiological importance. Reports may not necessarily represent new scientific results; rather, they can reproduce or supplement earlier studies.Reports from seven of the summer projects are included as separate chapters. The topics represented include multiscale mechanics, electrophysiology, pharmacology, and machine learning. This is an open access book.

This open access book revolves around predictive mathematical modelling and simulation of brain multiphysics with an emphasis on cerebrospinal fluid flow and solute transport in and around the human brain. The book consists of 10 self-contained and relatively short chapters, each offering a rapid introduction to a key problem or topic, supported by open source software. Readers will gain insights into state-of-the-art mathematical tools and techniques for modelling and simulation of brain multiphysics ranging from classical finite element approaches, network-based modelling techniques and deep neural networks. The target audiences are researchers in applied mathematics, scientific computing, biophysics, bioengineering or computational neuroscience interested in a compact introduction to image-based computational modeling of brain multiphysics and cutting-edge available tools.

This open access book provides the reader with a snapshot of the cutting-edge research being undertaken by the members of the FEniCS community, as presented at the FEniCS Conference at Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, Norway, in June 2024. The conference—and this book—features contributions from both the developers and users of the library, and includes applications of the software to a wide range of application areas spread throughout engineering, physics and biology. This book highlights topics in all these areas, many of which could not be simulated as efficiently—or even simulated at all—until recently. The FEniCS Project is an open-source finite element library developed by an international network of researchers. FEniCS gives its users easy access to powerful and scalable numerical tools for solving a great number of problems based on partial differential equations. Its contributions from academia and cutting-edge research mean that many recent algorithmic advances in the area are available in the library. Its open-source nature allows users to freely build their own developments into and on top of the core library, leading to some truly remarkable research. The topics presented in this book are backed up by openly available code examples, to enhance the reproducibility of the results presented within and further development. The target audience of this book is the researcher with an interest in numerical methods, their implementation and application, and the latest up-and-coming areas in which they are being applied.

In this open access volume, interested readers will find a number of modern approaches to modeling excitable tissue applied to current open research questions in the field via student reports from the 2024 and 2025 Simula Summer School in Computational Physiology (SSCP). SSCP is co-hosted by Simula, the University of Oslo (UiO), and UCSD. The course focuses on modeling excitable tissues. Masters and PhD students conduct group research projects, and each group produces a report addressing a specific problem of importance in physiology. Reports may not necessarily represent new scientific results; rather, they can reproduce or supplement earlier computational or experimental studies. Reports from eight of the summer projects are included as separate chapters. The fields represented include cardiac electrophysiology (Chapters 1-3), pancreatic beta-cell electrophysiology (Chapters 4-5), subcellular cardiac calcium handling (Chapter 6), cardiac mechanics (Chapter 7), and biology-inspired AI (Chapter 8).

This book introduces a novel approach to the design and operation of large ICT systems. It views the technical solutions and their stakeholders as complex adaptive systems and argues that traditional risk analyses cannot predict all future incidents with major impacts. To avoid unacceptable events, it is necessary to establish and operate anti-fragile ICT systems that limit the impact of all incidents, and which learn from small-impact incidents how to function increasingly well in changing environments. The book applies four design principles and one operational principle to achieve anti-fragility for different classes of incidents. It discusses how systems can achieve high availability, prevent malware epidemics, and detect anomalies. Analyses of Netflix’s media streaming solution, Norwegian telecom infrastructures, e-government platforms, and Numenta’s anomaly detection software show that cloud computing is essential to achieving anti-fragility forclasses of events with negative impacts.

The book serves both as a reference forvarious scaled models with corresponding dimensionless numbers, and as aresource for learning the art of scaling. A special feature of the book is the emphasis on how to create softwarefor scaled models, based on existing software for unscaled models. Scaling (or non-dimensionalization) is amathematical technique that greatly simplifies the setting of input parameters innumerical simulations. Moreover, scaling enhances the understanding of howdifferent physical processes interact in a differential equation model.Compared to the existing literature, where the topic of scaling is frequentlyencountered, but very often in only a brief and shallow setting, the presentbook gives much more thorough explanations of how to reason about finding theright scales. This process is highly problem dependent, and therefore the bookfeatures a lot of worked examples, from very simple ODEs to systems of PDEs,especially from fluid mechanics.The text is easily accessible andexample-driven. The first part on ODEs fits even a lower undergraduate level,while the most advanced multiphysics fluid mechanics examples target thegraduate level. The scientific literature is full of scaled models, but in mostof the cases, the scales are just stated without thorough mathematicalreasoning. This book explains how the scales are found mathematically.This book will be a valuable read for anyonedoing numerical simulations based on ordinary or partial differential equations.

This book offers a concise and gentle introduction to finite element programming in Python based on the popular FEniCS software library. Using a series of examples, including the Poisson equation, the equations of linear elasticity, the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, and systems of nonlinear advection–diffusion–reaction equations, it guides readers through the essential steps to quickly solving a PDE in FEniCS, such as how to define a finite variational problem, how to set boundary conditions, how to solve linear and nonlinear systems, and how to visualize solutions and structure finite element Python programs.This book is open access under a CC BY license.

This open access book answers two central questions: firstly, is it at all possible to verify electronic equipment procured from untrusted vendors? Secondly, can I build trust into my products in such a way that I support verification by untrusting customers?  In separate chapters the book takes readers through the state of the art in fields of computer science that can shed light on these questions. In a concluding chapter it discusses realistic ways forward.  In discussions on cyber security, there is a tacit assumption that the manufacturer of equipment will collaborate with the user of the equipment to stop third-party wrongdoers. The Snowden files and recent deliberations on the use of Chinese equipment in the critical infrastructures of western countries have changed this. The discourse in both cases revolves around what malevolent manufacturers can do to harm their own customers, and the importance of the matter is on par with questions of national security.This book is of great interest to ICT and security professionals who need a clear understanding of the two questions posed in the subtitle, and to decision-makers in industry, national bodies and nation states.