"This book is a boon to technology professionals who are responsible for global integration projects. Faced with the mind-boggling complexities of standardizing global data, global processes and global e-commerce, even the most experienced professionals are often at a loss. James Bean has created an extraordinary compilation of standards information, and provided his insight on how to resolve complex integration problems. This book will benefit IT community at large, and I would encourage both specialists and novices alike to bring this book into their personal libraries." -- Arka Mukherjee, Ph.D., CEO, Global IDs Inc.
A practitioner's guide to developing global e-commerce sites, focusing on the design and engineering of Web forms for global data collection and alignment with widely recognized international standards, XML structures, and XML vocabularies. The author describes the globalization problem, identifies common design errors, provides a representative scenario, and introduces effective solutions and techniques.
Structured around a practical, "real-world" theme, this book is written for the hands-on practicioner in any mid- to large-sized company engaging in international ecommerce (B2C, B2B, etc.)
* Presents effective techniques for flexible and extensible data capture
* Provides techniques for using the most recognized international data standards and describes the synergies, value and importance of XML as a transaction definition medium
* Only book on the subject written from a software engineering point of view

There is a broad consensus amongst law firms and in-house legal departments that next generation "Legal Tech" - particularly in the form of Blockchain-based technologies and Smart Contracts - will have a profound impact on the future operations of all legal service providers. Legal Tech startups are already revolutionizing the legal industry by increasing the speed and efficiency of traditional legal services or replacing them altogether with new technologies. This on-going process of disruption within the legal profession offers significant opportunities for all business. However, it also poses a number of challenges for practitioners, trade associations, technology vendors, and regulators who often struggle to keep up with the technologies, resulting in a widening regulatory "gap." Many uncertainties remain regarding the scope, direction, and effects of these new technologies and their integration with existing practices and legacy systems. Adding to the challenges is the growing need for easy-to-use contracting solutions, on the one hand, and for protecting the users of such solutions, on the other. To respond to the challenges and to provide better legal communications, systems, and services Legal Tech scholars and practitioners have found allies in the emerging field of Legal Design. This collection brings together leading scholars and practitioners working on these issues from diverse jurisdictions. The aim is to introduce Blockchain and Smart Contract technologies, and to examine their on-going impact on the legal profession, business and regulators.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Much of humanity's basis for existence is becoming subordinate to software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations that comprise what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data collection threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with software processes in order to allow a profound upgrade of our own ontological understanding. By mediating with a higher intelligence, we may be able to rediscover the inner logic of the age of intelligent machines. In The End of the Future, Stephanie Polsky conceives an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonization, navigational warfare, mercantilism, and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over the past five centuries, the era during which the world became "modern." The book animates the twenty-first century as an era in which the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, allowing an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of atomized political power, whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and in which digital media now serves to legitimize and promote a customized micropolitics of identity management. On this new apostolate plane, humanity may be able to shape a new world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This volume travels a course from Elizabethan England, to North American slavery, through cybernetic Social Engineering, Cold War counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where an organizing intelligence that started from an ambition to resourcefully manipulate physical bodies has ended with their profound neutralization.

This book focuses on the fundamentals of deep learning along with reporting on the current state-of-art research on deep learning. In addition, it provides an insight of deep neural networks in action with illustrative coding examples. Deep learning is a new area of machine learning research which has been introduced with the objective of moving ML closer to one of its original goals, i.e. artificial intelligence. Deep learning was developed as an ML approach to deal with complex input-output mappings. While traditional methods successfully solve problems where final value is a simple function of input data, deep learning techniques are able to capture composite relations between non-immediately related fields, for example between air pressure recordings and English words, millions of pixels and textual description, brand-related news and future stock prices and almost all real world problems. Deep learning is a class of nature inspired machine learning algorithms that uses a cascade of multiple layers of nonlinear processing units for feature extraction and transformation. Each successive layer uses the output from the previous layer as input. The learning may be supervised (e.g. classification) and/or unsupervised (e.g. pattern analysis) manners. These algorithms learn multiple levels of representations that correspond to different levels of abstraction by resorting to some form of gradient descent for training via backpropagation. Layers that have been used in deep learning include hidden layers of an artificial neural network and sets of propositional formulas. They may also include latent variables organized layer-wise in deep generative models such as the nodes in deep belief networks and deep boltzmann machines. Deep learning is part of state-of-the-art systems in various disciplines, particularly computer vision, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and human action recognition.

This book presents original, peer-reviewed research papers from the 4th Purple Mountain Forum -International Forum on Smart Grid Protection and Control (PMF2019-SGPC), held in Nanjing, China on August 17-18, 2019. Addressing the latest research hotspots in the power industry, such as renewable energy integration, flexible interconnection of large scale power grids, integrated energy system, and cyber physical power systems, the papers share the latest research findings and practical application examples of the new theories, methodologies and algorithms in these areas. As such book a valuable reference for researchers, engineers, and university students.

Robotic animals are nowadays developed for various types of research, such as bio-inspired robotics, biomimetics and animal behavior studies. More specifically, in the case of collective animal behavior research, the robotic device can interact with animals by generating and exploiting signals relevant for social behavior. Once perceived by the animal society as conspecific, these robots can become powerful tools to study the animal behaviors, as they can at the same time monitor the changes in behavior and influence the collective choices of the animal society. In this book, we present novel robotized tools that can integrate shoals of fish in order to study their collective behaviors. We used the current state of the art on the zebrafish social behavior to define the specifications of the robots, and we performed stimuli analysis to improve their developments. Bio-inspired controllers were designed based on data extracted from experiments with zebrafish for the robots to mimic the zebrafish locomotion underwater. Experiments involving mixed groups of fish and robots qualified the robotic system to be integrated among a zebrafish shoal and to be able to influence the collective decisions of the fish. These results are very promising for the field of animal-robot interaction studies, as we showed the effect of the robots in long-duration experiments and repetitively, with the same order of response from the animals.

Cloud technologies have revolutionized the way we store information and perform various computing tasks. With the rise of this new technology, the ability to secure information stored on the cloud becomes a concern. The Handbook of Research on Securing Cloud-Based Databases with Biometric Applications explores the latest innovations in promoting cloud security through human authentication techniques. Exploring methods of access by identification, including the analysis of facial features, fingerprints, DNA, dental characteristics, and voice patterns, this publication is designed especially for IT professionals, academicians, and upper-level students seeking current research surrounding cloud security.

This book contains thirty-five selected papers presented at the International Conference on Evolutionary and Deterministic Methods for Design, Optimization and Control with Applications to Industrial and Societal Problems (EUROGEN 2017). This was one of the Thematic Conferences of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS). Topics treated in the various chapters reflect the state of the art in theoretical and numerical methods and tools for optimization, and engineering design and societal applications. The volume focuses particularly on intelligent systems for multidisciplinary design optimization (mdo) problems based on multi-hybridized software, adjoint-based and one-shot methods, uncertainty quantification and optimization, multidisciplinary design optimization, applications of game theory to industrial optimization problems, applications in structural and civil engineering optimum design and surrogate models based optimization methods in aerodynamic design.

How are artificial intelligence (AI) and the strong claims made by their philosophical representatives to be understood and evaluated from a Kantian perspective? Conversely, what can we learn from AI and its functions about Kantian philosophy's claims to validity? This volume focuses on various aspects, such as the self, the spirit, self-consciousness, ethics, law, and aesthetics to answer these questions.

Recent research reveals that socioeconomic factors of the neighborhoods where road users live and where pedestrian-vehicle crashes occur are important in determining the severity of the crashes, with the former having a greater influence. Hence, road safety countermeasures, especially those focusing on the road users, should be targeted at these high risk neighborhoods. Big Data Analytics in Traffic and Transportation Engineering: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source that discusses access to transportation and examines vehicle-pedestrian crashes, specifically in relation to socioeconomic factors that influence them, main predictors, factors that contribute to crash severity, and the enhancement of pedestrian safety measures. Featuring research on topics such as public transport, accessibility, and spatial distribution, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, transportation engineers, road safety designers, transport planners and managers, professionals, academicians, researchers, and public administrators.

Many everyday dilemmas existing in the real world are complex and difficult to solve or fix, ranging from tax evasion to dispatching taxis to scheduling patient visits in hospitals, and much more. Within these complicated problems, however, lies the potential to be simplified or solved by intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. Theoretical and Practical Frameworks for Agent-Based Systems tackles these real problems and many more, bringing the theoretical research of intelligent agents to researchers and practitioners in academia, government, and innumerable industries. Professionals and experts in every field ranging from education to healthcare and beyond will find this reference to be essential in the understanding of agents, and researchers currently working in the field of intelligent agents will benefit from this exciting examination of practical applications.

Significant research and development advancement has been achieved in enterprise computing, integration, and management. The results of this advancement stimulate the creation of a new class of mission-critical infrastructures, a new category of integration methods and software tools, and a new group of business platforms for cost-effectively exploiting, integrating, and managing business operations across enterprises. ""Enterprise Service Computing: From Concept To Deployment"" presents the emerging service computing, or service-enabled computing, technologies currently preferably used in integrating enterprise-wide and cross-enterprise applications. The topics covered range from concept development, system design, modeling, and development technologies, to the final deployment, providing both theoretical research results and practical applications.

After a short description of the key concepts of big data the book explores on the secrecy and security threats posed especially by cloud based data storage. It delivers conceptual frameworks and models along with case studies of recent technology.

This book discusses the applications of different soft computing techniques for the web-based systems and services. The respective chapters highlight recent developments in the field of soft computing applications, from web-based information retrieval to online marketing and online healthcare. In each chapter author endeavor to explain the basic ideas behind the proposed applications in an accessible format for readers who may not possess a background in these fields. This carefully edited book covers a wide range of new applications of soft computing techniques in Web recommender systems, Online documents classification, Online documents summarization, Online document clustering, Online market intelligence, Web usage profiling, Web data extraction, Social network extraction, Question answering systems, Online health care, Web knowledge management, Multimedia information retrieval, Navigation guides, User profiles extraction, Web-based distributed information systems, Web security applications, Internet of Things Applications and so on. The book is aimed for researchers and practitioner who are engaged in developing and applying intelligent systems principles for solving real-life problems. Further, it has been structured so that each chapter can be read independently of the others.

With the proliferation of devices connected to the internet and connected to each other, the volume of data collected, stored, and processed is increasing every day, which brings new challenges in terms of information security. As big data expands with the help of public clouds, traditional security solutions tailored to private computing infrastructures and confined to a well-defined security perimeter, such as firewalls and demilitarized zones (DMZs), are no longer effective. New security functions are required to work over the heterogenous composition of diverse hardware, operating systems, and network domains. Security, Privacy, and Forensics Issues in Big Data is an essential research book that examines recent advancements in big data and the impact that these advancements have on information security and privacy measures needed for these networks. Highlighting a range of topics including cryptography, data analytics, and threat detection, this is an excellent reference source for students, software developers and engineers, security analysts, IT consultants, academicians, researchers, and professionals.

This book presents recent research on computational intelligence (CI) algorithms in the field of sport. In the modern age, information technologies have greatly reduced the need for human effort in the carrying out of many daily tasks. These technologies have radically influenced the lives of humans, and the information society in general. Unfortunately, these advances have brought with them certain negative effects, including the encouragement of sedentary lifestyles and the attendant health problems such as obesity that these engender. Other modern maladies, chiefly cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer, have also been on the increase. Today, sports are virtually the only activity that still connects modern humans to their original lifestyle, which was based on physical motion. This book tears familiarizing sports scientists with the foundations of computational intelligence, while at the same time presenting the problems that have arisen in the training domain to computer scientists. Lastly, the book proposes the use of an Artificial Sports Trainer designed to enhance the training of modern athletes who cannot afford the considerable expense of hiring a human personal trainer. This intelligent system can monitor performance and design and direct appropriate future training, thus promoting both healthy lifestyles and competitive success in athletes.

The author presents Probatio, a toolkit for building functional DMI (digital musical instruments) prototypes, artifacts in which gestural control and sound production are physically decoupled but digitally mapped. He uses the concept of instrumental inheritance, the application of gestural and/or structural components of existing instruments to generate ideas for new instruments. To support analysis and combination, he then leverages a traditional design method, the morphological chart, in which existing artifacts are split into parts, presented in a visual form and then recombined to produce new ideas. And finally he integrates the concept and the method in a concrete object, a physical prototyping toolkit for building functional DMI prototypes: Probatio. The author's evaluation of this modular system shows it reduces the time required to develop functional prototypes. The book is useful for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in the areas of musical creativity and human-computer interaction, in particular those engaged in generating, communicating, and testing ideas in complex design spaces.

Spatial Databases: Technologies, Techniques and Trends Introduces the reader to the world of spatial databases, and related subtopics. The broad range of topics covered within the chapters includes spatial data modeling, indexing of spatial and spatiotemporal objects, data mining and knowledge discovery in spatial and spatiotemporal management issues and query processing for moving objects. The reader will be able to get in touch with several important research issues the research community is dealing with today. Covering fundamental aspects up to advanced material, this book appeals to a broad computer science audience. Although perfect for specialists, each chapter is self-contained, making it easy for non-specialists to grasp the main issues involved.

This book offers a collection of original peer-reviewed contributions presented at the 3rd International and 18th National Conference on Machines and Mechanisms (iNaCoMM), organized by Division of Remote Handling & Robotics, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, India, from December 13th to 15th, 2017 (iNaCoMM 2017). It reports on various theoretical and practical features of machines, mechanisms and robotics; the contributions include carefully selected, novel ideas on and approaches to design, analysis, prototype development, assessment and surveys. Applications in machine and mechanism engineering, serial and parallel manipulators, power reactor engineering, autonomous vehicles, engineering in medicine, image-based data analytics, compliant mechanisms, and safety mechanisms are covered. Further papers provide in-depth analyses of data preparation, isolation and brain segmentation for focused visualization and robot-based neurosurgery, new approaches to parallel mechanism-based Master-Slave manipulators, solutions to forward kinematic problems, and surveys and optimizations based on historical and contemporary compliant mechanism-based design. The spectrum of contributions on theory and practice reveals central trends and newer branches of research in connection with these topics.

Bioinformatics is an integrative field of computer science, genetics, genomics, proteomics, and statistics, which has undoubtedly revolutionized the study of biology and medicine in past decades. It mainly assists in modeling, predicting and interpreting large multidimensional biological data by utilizing advanced computational methods. Despite its enormous potential, bioinformatics is not widely integrated into the academic curriculum as most life science students and researchers are still not equipped with the necessary knowledge to take advantage of this powerful tool. Hence, the primary purpose of our book is to supplement this unmet need by providing an easily accessible platform for students and researchers starting their career in life sciences. This book aims to avoid sophisticated computational algorithms and programming. Instead, it focuses on simple DIY analysis and interpretation of biological data with personal computers. Our belief is that once the beginners acquire these basic skillsets, they will be able to handle most of the bioinformatics tools for their research work and to better understand their experimental outcomes. Our second title of this volume set In Silico Life Sciences: Medicine provides hands-on experience in analyzing high throughput molecular data for the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of monogenic or polygenic human diseases. The key concepts in this volume include risk factor assessment, genetic tests and result interpretation, personalized medicine, and drug discovery. This volume is expected to train readers in both single and multi-dimensional biological analysis using open data sets, and provides a unique learning experience through clinical scenarios and case studies.

The computer graphics (CG) industry is an attractive field for undergraduate students, but employers often find that graduates of CG art programmes are not proficient. The result is that many positions are left vacant, despite large numbers of job applicants. This book investigates how student CG artists develop proficiency. The subject is important to the rapidly growing number of educators in this sector, employers of graduates, and students who intend to develop proficiency for the purpose of obtaining employment. Educators will see why teaching software-oriented knowledge to students does not lead to proficiency, but that the development of problem-solving and visualisation skills do. This book follows a narrow focus, as students develop proficiency in a cognitively challenging task known as 'NURBS modelling'. This task was chosen due to an observed relationship between students who succeeded in the task, and students who successfully obtained employment after graduation. In the study this is based on, readers will be shown that knowledge-based explanations for the development of proficiency do not adequately account for proficiency or expertise in this field, where visualisation has been observed to develop suddenly rather than over an extended period of time. This is an unusual but not unique observation. Other studies have shown rapid development of proficiency and expertise in certain professions, such as among telegraph operators, composers and chess players. Based on these observations, the book argues that threshold concepts play a key role in the development of expertise among CG artists.