Environmental Geomechanics cover a wide range of topics concerned with the mechanical behaviour of geomaterials. The problems addressed are complex, mainly due to the coexistence of several species and phases, to their interaction and their often non-linear behaviour. Experimental evidence is difficult to obtain and laboratory as well as in-situ testing procedures present serious challenges. Numerical techniques are used to solve the complex non-linear analytical systems. Integration of new models for engineering applications will require a considerable effort among engineering teams. Due to the number of phenomena influencing the solutions an interdisciplinary approach to Environmental Geomechanics is therefore necessary.

The Workshop will specifically cover the following topics of environmental geomechanics: Constitutive aspects - Mechanics of unsaturated soils, thermal behaviour, influence of chemical content of fluids on the mechanical properties, durability, creep and long-term effects. Coupled Formulations - Thermodynamics, mixture theories, intercation between constituents, phase changes. Case studies - Advanced modelling of real cases will provide example of potential and limitations of the existing theories.

Solidication is one of the oldest processes for producing complex shapes for applications ranging from art to industry, and it remains as one of the most important commercial processes for many materials. Since the 1980's, numerous fundamental developments in the understanding of solidication processes and microstructure formation have come from both analytical theories and the application of computational techniques using commonly available powerful computers.

Linear operators in Hilbert space play a fundamental role in the formulation of quantum theory. This book offers a self-contained presentation of the most important tools and methods from Hilbert space theory, with particular focus on the spectral theory of self-adjoint operators.

The book presents the state of the art in machine learning algorithms as applied to the classification and mapping of spatially distributed environmental data. The book provides a CD-ROM with the Machine Learning Office software, including sample sets of data, that will allow both students and researchers to put the concepts rapidly to practice.

This volume grew out from a one-semester research program at the Bernouilli Center (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland) from January to June 2007. The research articles and survey papers...