A major investment in professional development is necessary to ensure the fundamental success of instructors in technology-integrated classrooms and in online courses. However, while traditional models of professional development rely on face-to-face instruction, online methods are also gaining traction-viable means for faculty development.Virtual Mentoring for Teachers: Online Professional Development Practices offers peer-reviewed essays and research reports contributed by an array of scholars and practitioners in the field of instructional technology and online education. It is organized around two primary themes: professional development models for faculty in online environments and understanding e-Learning and best practices in teaching and learning in online environments. The objective of this scholarship is to highlight research-based online professional development programs and best practices models that have been shown to enhance effective teaching and learning in a variety of environments.

Robots challenge humans' beliefs and expectations. Hence, regardless of whether they are the audience of a conference, the visitors of a lab, the citizens in general, some journalists, or the European Parliament, the first step in order to gain a better understanding of the field of robotics is obviously to consult the experts. Roboticists seem indeed to be in the best position to guide society in this matter, whether it is in the everyday life or within an official institution. Today however, there is a gap between the robots, as they are actually thought and built, and the intelligent and autonomous machines, as they are perceived by the society. How can we explain it? Do the words borrowed from the living organisms and used to describe robots play a role in the confusion about the status of the discipline of robotics? The texts gathered within this book focus on the problematic of wording robotics from various perspectives. They are the results of a unique interdisciplinary meeting gathering roboticists, linguists, philosophers and neuroscientists, the 4th Workshop of Anthropomorphic Motion Factory held at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse on Nov 31st - Dec 1st 2017.

Recent developments in model-predictive control promise remarkable opportunities for designing multi-input, multi-output control systems and improving the control of single-input, single-output systems. This volume provides a definitive survey of the latest model-predictive control methods available to engineers and scientists today. The initial set of chapters present various methods for managing uncertainty in systems, including stochastic model-predictive control. With the advent of affordable and fast computation, control engineers now need to think about using "computationally intensive controls," so the second part of this book addresses the solution of optimization problems in "real" time for model-predictive control. The theory and applications of control theory often influence each other, so the last section of Handbook of Model Predictive Control rounds out the book with representative applications to automobiles, healthcare, robotics, and finance. The chapters in this volume will be useful to working engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, as well as students and faculty interested in the progression of control theory. Future developments in MPC will no doubt build from concepts demonstrated in this book and anyone with an interest in MPC will find fruitful information and suggestions for additional reading.

This book is a tribute to Julian Francis Miller's ideas and achievements in computer science, evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming, electronics, unconventional computing, artificial chemistry and theoretical biology. Leading international experts in computing inspired by nature offer their insights into the principles of information processing and optimisation in simulated and experimental living, physical and chemical substrates. Miller invented Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) in 1999, from a representation of electronic circuits he devised with Thomson a few years earlier. The book presents a number of CGP's wide applications, including multi-step ahead forecasting, solving artificial neural networks dogma, approximate computing, medical informatics, control engineering, evolvable hardware, and multi-objective evolutionary optimisations. The book addresses in depth the technique of 'Evolution in Materio', a term coined by Miller and Downing, using a range of examples of experimental prototypes of computing in disordered ensembles of graphene nanotubes, slime mould, plants, and reaction diffusion chemical systems. Advances in sub-symbolic artificial chemistries, artificial bio-inspired development, code evolution with genetic programming, and using Reed-Muller expansions in the synthesis of Boolean quantum circuits add a unique flavour to the content. The book is a pleasure to explore for readers from all walks of life, from undergraduate students to university professors, from mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers to chemists and biologists.

This book presents the Proceedings of The International Science and Technology Conference "FarEastCon-2018," which took place on October 2-4, 2018 in Vladivostok, Russian Federation. The conference provided a platform for accumulating expert opinion on projects and initiatives aimed at the implementation of far-sighted scientific research and development, and allowed current scientific and practical achievements to be shared with wide circle of researchers. Featuring selected papers from the conference, the book is of interest to a broad range of experts involved in developing innovative solutions and organizing events that increase the efficiency of economic and innovative activities.

What is mind? ""Can we build synthetic or artificial minds?"" Think these questions are only reserved for Science Fiction? Well, not anymore. This collection presents a diverse overview of where the development of artificial minds is as the twenty first century begins. Examined from nearly all viewpoints, Visions of Mind includes perspectives from philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, social studies and artificial intelligence. This collection comes largely as a result of many conferences and symposiums conducted by many of the leading minds on this topic. At the core is Professor Aaron Sloman's symposium from the spring 2000 UK Society for Artificial Intelligence conference. Authors from that symposium, as well as others from around the world have updated their perspectives and contributed to this powerful book. The result is a multi-disciplinary approach to the long term problem of designing a human-like mind, whether for scientific, social, or engineering purposes. The topics addressed within this text are valuable to both artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and also to the academic disciplines that they draw on and feed. Among those disciplines are philosophy, computer science, and psychology.

Business processes are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic as they seek to cope with a wide range of internal and external interactions and changes. ""The Handbook of Research on Complex Dynamic Process Management: Techniques for Adaptability in Turbulent Environments"" investigates the nature and history of dynamic processes essential to understanding the need for flexibility and adaptability as well as the requirements to improve solutions. This innovative collection covers the development of various strategies, architectures, and techniques for achieving adaptive processes in environments.

This book illustrates all the concepts of web mining from gathering the web data sources to discovering and representing the extracted knowledge. This book is ideal for many researchers and scholars who are interested in a reference book that involves all the techniques and algorithms that are applied to a Web environment. This book illustrates, analyzes, and compares all the techniques, applications, and algorithms that are used in Web mining categories and provides a thorough overview to undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars who wish to learn more about Web and data mining. The goal of this book is to foster transformative, multidisciplinary, and novel approaches that introduce the practical approach of analyzing various web data sources and extracting knowledge by taking into consideration the unique challenges present in the environment. This book provides a complete overview of Web mining techniques and applications; it will be crucial for postgraduate students who want to understand the Web environment better and do not know the differences between Web mining and data mining. It will also be helpful for companies and organizations to discover practical solutions to handle their internet data in a more efficient way, as well as undergraduate students in software engineering and computer science engineering departments who do not have a complete reference book that offers them a full explanation about Web mining.

Now fully revised and updated, "VSAT Networks" continues to cover all of the essential issues involved with the installation and operation of networks of small earth stations called 'Very Small Aperture Terminal'. VSATs are typically one to two meters in antenna reflector diameter and communicate with one another, or with a central earth station called a 'hub', via a relay satellite in space. This informative volume enables the reader to understand how services, economics and regulatory aspects condition the success of such networks.

Key features include: configuration and practical applications of VSAT networks radio frequency (RF) link analysis, focusing on basic formulae and the evaluation of the RF link performance protocols used, with emphasis on the necessary adaptation of protocols used in terrestrial networks procedures for the dimensioning of the network according to the type and volume of generated traffic and to the expected quality of service

Written by a well-known, highly respected academic, this authoritative volume will appeal to students of telecommunications, electronics and computer science. Practising telecommunications engineers and technical managers involved in the planning, design and operation of networks and service provision will all find this book a valuable reference source.

This "Second Edition" has taken full advantage of the author's experience gained from the success of the first edition. The theoretical background has been expanded and the operational contents have been updated in view of recent developments in the field.

This book gathers revised and extended versions of the best papers presented at the 8th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI 2016), which was held in Porto, Portugal from 9 to 11 November 2016. The papers address three main fields of Computational Intelligence, namely: Evolutionary Computation, Fuzzy Computation, and Neural Computation. In addition to highlighting recent advances in these areas, the book offers veteran researchers new and innovative solutions, while also providing a source of information and inspiration for newcomers to the field.

One of the goals of artificial intelligence (AI) is creating autonomous agents that must make decisions based on uncertain and incomplete information. The goal is to design rational agents that must take the best action given the information available and their goals. Decision Theory Models for Applications in Artificial Intelligence: Concepts and Solutions provides an introduction to different types of decision theory techniques, including MDPs, POMDPs, Influence Diagrams, and Reinforcement Learning, and illustrates their application in artificial intelligence. This book provides insights into the advantages and challenges of using decision theory models for developing intelligent systems.

Multiplying Worlds argues that modern forms of virtual reality first appear in the urban/commercial milieu of London in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century (1780-1830). It develops a revisionary account of relations between romanticism and popular entertainments, 'high' and 'low' literature, and verbal and visual virtual realities during this period. The argument is divided into three parts. The first, 'From the Actual to the Virtual', focuses on developments during the period from 1780 to 1795, as represented by Robert Barker's Panorama, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and James Graham's Temple of Health and Hymen. The second part, 'From Representation to Poiesis', extends the study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century virtual realities to include textual media. It considers the relation between textual and visual virtual-realities, while also introducing the Palace of Pandemonium and Satan/Prometheus as key figures in late eighteenth-century explorations of the implications of virtual reality. There are chapters on Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Beckford's Fonthill Abbey, the Phantasmagoria, and Romantic representations of Satan. The book's third part, 'Actuvirtuality and Virtuactuality', provides an introduction to the Romantics' remarkably diverse (and to this point rarely studied) engagements with the virtual. It focuses on attempts to describe or indirectly present the cultural, material, or psychological apparatuses that project the perceptual world; reflections on the epistemological, ethical and political paradoxes that arise in a world of actuvirtuality and virtuactuality; and experiments in the construction of virtual worlds that, like those of Shakespeare (according to Coleridge) are not bound by 'the iron compulsion of [everyday] space and time'.

This book is an overview of current research in theoretical and practical aspects of security in distributed systems, in particular in information systems and related security tools. Issues treated in the book are security in XML-based management systems, security of multimedia data, technology and use of smart cards, applications of cryptography, security of distributed applications and adherence to standards, model and security issues associated with the organization of components (architectures) of information systems, such as networked systems (Internet and WWW-based), client/server architectures, andlayered architectures. Contributions come both from the academic and the industrial field.

A Deep Dive into NoSQL Databases: The Use Cases and Applications, Volume 109, the latest release in the Advances in Computers series first published in 1960, presents detailed coverage of innovations in computer hardware, software, theory, design and applications. In addition, it provides contributors with a medium in which they can explore their subjects in greater depth and breadth. This update includes sections on NoSQL and NewSQL databases for big data analytics and distributed computing, NewSQL databases and scalable in-memory analytics, NoSQL web crawler application, NoSQL Security, a Comparative Study of different In-Memory (No/New)SQL Databases, NoSQL Hands On-4 NoSQLs, the Hadoop Ecosystem, and more.

In real management situations, uncertainty is inherently present in decision making. As such, it is increasingly imperative to research and develop new theories and methods of fuzzy sets. Theoretical and Practical Advancements for Fuzzy System Integration is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the importance of expressing and measuring fuzziness in order to develop effective and practical decision making models and methods. Featuring coverage on an expansive range of perspectives and topics, such as fuzzy logic control, intuitionistic fuzzy set theory, and defuzzification, this book is ideally designed for academics, professionals, and researchers seeking current research on theoretical frameworks and real-world applications in the area of fuzzy sets and systems.

Advanced research in the field of mechatronics and robotics represents a unifying interdisciplinary and intelligent engineering science paradigm. It is a holistic, concurrent, and interdisciplinary engineering science that identifies novel possibilities of synergizing and fusing different disciplines. The Handbook of Research on Advanced Mechatronic Systems and Intelligent Robotics is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of knowledge in both theoretical and practical skills of intelligent robotics and mechatronics. While highlighting topics including green technology, machine learning, and virtual manufacturing, this book is ideally designed for researchers, students, engineers, and computer practitioners seeking current research on developing innovative ideas for intelligent robotics and autonomous and smart interdisciplinary mechatronic products.

Constant improvements in technological applications have allowed for more opportunities to develop automated systems. This not only leads to higher success in smart data analysis, but also ensures that technological progression will continue. Ubiquitous Machine Learning and its Applications is a pivotal reference source for the latest research on the issues and challenges machines face in the new millennium. Featuring extensive coverage on relevant areas such as computational advertising, software engineering, and bioinformatics, this publication is an ideal resource for academicians, graduate students, engineering professionals, and researchers interested in discovering how they can apply these advancements to various disciplines.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in supercomputer simulation. It includes the latest findings from leading researchers using systems from the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) in 2017. The reports cover all fields of computational science and engineering ranging from CFD to computational physics and from chemistry to computer science with a special emphasis on industrially relevant applications. Presenting findings of one of Europe's leading systems, this volume covers a wide variety of applications that deliver a high level of sustained performance.The book covers the main methods in high-performance computing. Its outstanding results in achieving the best performance for production codes are of particular interest for both scientists and engineers. The book comes with a wealth of color illustrations and tables of results.

This book highlights new trends and challenges in research on agents and the new digital and knowledge economy. It includes papers on business- process management, agent-based modeling and simulation, and anthropic-oriented computing, which were originally presented at the 13th International KES Conference on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems - Technologies and Applications (KES-AMSTA 2019) held June 17-19, 2019 at St George's Bay, St. Julians, Malta. Today's economy is driven by technologies and knowledge. Digital technologies can free, shift and multiply choices, and often intrude on the territory of other industries by providing new ways of conducting business operations and creating value for customers and companies. As such, the book covers topics such as software agents, multi-agent systems, agent modeling, mobile and cloud computing, big data analysis, business intelligence, artificial intelligence, social systems, computer embedded systems and nature inspired manufacturing, all of which contribute to the modern digital economy. The research presented is of value to researchers and industrial practitioners working in the fields of artificial intelligence, collective computational intelligence, innovative business models, the new digital and knowledge economy and, in particular, agent and multi-agent systems, technologies, tools and applications.

A new set of major changes is reshaping the economy and creating challenges that are testing the mettle and talents of organizations and their employees. Unless organizations and their employees develop the requisite skills they need to cope with these challenges, many will become casualties of their own deficiencies. "Keys to Employee Success in Coming Decades" seeks to prepare employees for future success in an increasingly demanding and competitive global environment. Sims, Veres, and their contributors are careful to focus on what employees at different levels in the organization will need to do to be successful in the twenty-first century.

Mastery of the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors discussed by the contributors in this book will lead to enhanced employee performance as the new decade approaches. The requirements for new employees or the redesigned employees is quickly changing. The organizations of tomorrow will expect employees who understand the importance of success; who welcome change and accept it, master it, and deliberately cause it. They are also employees who are proactive innovators, who confront constraints and the limitations on actions that they impose, who take risks and who continue to develop themselves professionally, technically, and personally. Written clearly, concisely, and with a minimum of academic jargon, the book will be important reading for specialists in human resource management, training and development, and others with critical responsibilities throughout the organization.

This book contains 74 papers presented at ICTCS 2017: Third International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Competitive Strategies. The conference was held during 16-17 December 2017, Udaipur, India and organized by Association of Computing Machinery, Udaipur Professional Chapter in association with The Institution of Engineers (India), Udaipur Local Center and Global Knowledge Research Foundation. This book contains papers mainly focused on ICT for Computation, Algorithms and Data Analytics and IT Security etc.

The book presents innovative scientific research works by academics, research scholars and students, presented at the 2017 International Conference on Energy, Materials and Information Technology at Amity University Jharkhand, India. It includes contributions on system solutions based on soft computing techniques, and covers innovative soft computing techniques and tools with advanced applications. A major focus of the book is on presenting interdisciplinary problems and how they can be solved using information technology, together with innovative connections to other disciplines. It also includes papers on cloud computing and WSN-related real-time research.

This book introduces readers to the use of R codes for optimization problems. First, it provides the necessary background to understand data envelopment analysis (DEA), with a special emphasis on fuzzy DEA. It then describes DEA models, including fuzzy DEA models, and shows how to use them to solve optimization problems with R. Further, it discusses the main advantages of R in optimization problems, and provides R codes based on real-world data sets throughout. Offering a comprehensive review of DEA and fuzzy DEA models and the corresponding R codes, this practice-oriented reference guide is intended for masters and Ph.D. students in various disciplines, as well as practitioners and researchers.