This textbook guides readers through their first steps into the challenging world of mimicking human vision with computational tools and techniques pertaining to the field of image processing and analysis. While today's theoretical and applied processing and analysis of images meet with challenging and complex problems, this primer is confined to a much simpler, albeit critical, collection of image-to-image transformations, including image normalisation, enhancement, and filtering.It serves as an introduction to beginners, a refresher for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as engineers and computer scientists confronted with a problem to solve in computer vision. The book covers basic image processing/computer vision pipeline techniques, which are widely used in today's computer vision, computer graphics, and image processing, giving the readers enough knowledge to successfully tackle a wide range of applied problems.

Here's a thorough introduction to the latest developments in database systems design presented from an applications point of view. Featuring contributions from well-known experts in the field, this book pays special attention to issues raised by new trends in database design, and how these developments affect the programmer and database administrator.

An essential capacity of intelligence is the ability to learn. An artificially intelligent system that could learn would not have to be programmed for every eventuality; it could adapt to its changing environment and conditions just as biological systems do. "Illustrating Evolutionary Computation with Mathematica" introduces evolutionary computation to the technically savvy reader who wishes to explore this fascinating and increasingly important field. Unique among books on evolutionary computation, the book also explores the application of evolution to developmental processes in nature, such as the growth processes in cells and plants. If you are a newcomer to the evolutionary computation field, an engineer, a programmer, or even a biologist wanting to learn how to model the evolution and coevolution of plants, this book will provide you with a visually rich and engaging account of this complex subject.
* Introduces the major mechanisms of biological evolution.
* Demonstrates many fascinating aspects of evolution in nature with simple, yet illustrative examples.
* Explains each of the major branches of evolutionary computation: genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolutionary programming, and evolution strategies.
* Demonstrates the programming of computers by evolutionary principles using Evolvica, a genetic programming system designed by the author.
* Shows in detail how to evolve developmental programs modeled by cellular automata and Lindenmayer systems.
* Provides Mathematica notebooks on the Web that include all the programs in the book and supporting animations, movies, and graphics.

This book provides an interdisciplinary approach to complexity, combining ideas from areas like complex networks, cellular automata, multi-agent systems, self-organization and game theory. The first part of the book provides an extensive introduction to these areas, while the second explores a range of research scenarios. Lastly, the book presents CellNet, a software framework that offers a hands-on approach to the scenarios described throughout the book. In light of the introductory chapters, the research chapters, and the CellNet simulating framework, this book can be used to teach undergraduate and master's students in disciplines like artificial intelligence, computer science, applied mathematics, economics and engineering. Moreover, the book will be particularly interesting for Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers seeking a general perspective on how to design and create their own models.

Whether an old photograph or a single video frame, there is a wealth of data hidden in a picture. Image processing and pattern analysis play a vital role in engineering science and can be applied in diverse areas to solve existing and practical problems. The Handbook of Research on Emerging Perspectives in Intelligent Pattern Recognition, Analysis, and Image Processing discusses the advances of image processing and pattern analysis and addresses how new innovations will cater to the demands of daily life. This handbook provides the resources necessary for technology developers, scientists, and policymakers to adopt and implement new inventions across the globe. The chapters presented in this publication encompass various aspects of recent image processing and pattern analysis innovations including, but not limited to, mobile image tracking, motion picture analysis, pattern classification, multisensory data fusion, 3D imaging, supporting routing protocols, brain computer interfaces, image restoration, and medical imaging.

Clustered configuration first hit the scene nearly 20 years ago when Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduced the VaxCluster. Until now, the topic of Real Application Clusters (RAC) implementation had never been fully explored. For the first time, Murali Vallath dissects RAC mysteries in his book Oracle Real Application Clusters to enlighten and educate readers on the internals of RAC operations, cache fusion, fusion recovery processes and the fast reconfiguration of RAC.
This book provides comprehensive coverage of the features, technology and principles of RAC that is part of the Oracle9i release of Oracle's RDBMS product. It is divided into three main parts: application/database design, development and maintenance life cycles.
Compared to its predecessor OPS, the architecture behind RAC implementation have changed significantly. Vallath discusses Oracle9i features in a RAC implementation with respect to usage and design considerations, as well as those parameters that are and are not applicable. Areas covered include partitioning, indexes, tablespace management, transaction management, backup and recovery principles. Performance tuning with examples, troubleshooting and problem solving scenarios are covered in detail, as well as discussions on the migration process from a single instance database to RAC and migration from an OPS implementation to RAC.
Oracle Real Application Clusters takes readers through a logical flow from RAC concepts to operations, covering each facet with a fine-tooth comb. Vallath's skilled writing style makes each chapter entertaining and informative as only a true RAC connoisseur can provide. New and experienced users of RAC, as well as those seeking to expand their knowledge of this dynamic technology, will find this book to be a necessity for both home and office reference libraries.
*Focuses on implementing, testing and tuning features of Real Application Clusters (RAC)
*Provides extensive coverage of usage, day-to-day functions and operations
*Includes tips and techniques such as script samples to illustrate various features of RAC
*Unravels the internals of RAC architecture

Intelligent methods are used in distributed environments in countless ways, with examples such as propagation, communication, collaboration, and cooperation. With the abundant purposes for intelligence in distributed systems, it is pertinent for researchers, technicians, and students in various areas of computer science to discover the most current and definitive advances in the field.""Intelligence Integration in Distributed Knowledge Management"" provides recent technologies and practices in intelligence for distributed systems, while covering major aspects of the agent based systems. This book is a must for those striving to enhance their understanding of distributed knowledge management and extend their ideas of cooperation using for numerous real-world problems.

These contributions, written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners of Genetic Programming (GP), explore the synergy between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP. Chapters in this volume include: Similarity-based Analysis of Population Dynamics in GP Performing Symbolic Regression Hybrid Structural and Behavioral Diversity Methods in GP Multi-Population Competitive Coevolution for Anticipation of Tax Evasion Evolving Artificial General Intelligence for Video Game Controllers A Detailed Analysis of a PushGP Run Linear Genomes for Structured Programs Neutrality, Robustness, and Evolvability in GP Local Search in GP PRETSL: Distributed Probabilistic Rule Evolution for Time-Series Classification Relational Structure in Program Synthesis Problems with Analogical Reasoning An Evolutionary Algorithm for Big Data Multi-Class Classification Problems A Generic Framework for Building Dispersion Operators in the Semantic Space Assisting Asset Model Development with Evolutionary Augmentation Building Blocks of Machine Learning Pipelines for Initialization of a Data Science Automation Tool Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results.

It is hard to believe that the pursuit of artificial intelligence is not a phenomenon of the twentieth century. For over three hundred years, the boundaries between bodies and machines - the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate - have been passionately explored. These explorations, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth and increasing during the nineteenth century, have been all but forgotten, lost beneath the commotion of the modern day world. This book retrieves these lost histories, giving voice to the hopes, dreams, and fears of philosophers, medical practitioners, engineers, craftsmen and artisans who have all been fascinated by the interface between bodies and machines. The journey back in time unfolds with the mysterious advent of mechanical philosophies, which conceptualized the body and the surrounding world largely in terms of mechanistic interactions. These theories develop in intriguing directions and fuel experiments in such areas as material production and social punishment, spiritualism and mental health. From reanimating dead bodies with electricity, which led to the introduction of the electric chair, through to the use of machines to render 'hysterics' and the insane fit for reintroduction into society, this book conveys the dark truths behind our relationship with machines.This book is not only an exceptional contribution to the history of technology but also to contemporary debates about humans and machines.

The ability to communicate with anyone at anytime, anywhere, necessitates a need to provide reliable, resilient, and sustainable applications to support the evolving uses of mobile technologies. Movement-Aware Applications for Sustainable Mobility: Technologies and Approaches focuses on the use of location sensing technology and its wider applicability in supporting sustainable mobility, and presents current research on developing innovative approaches for gathering, representing, storing and analyzing movement data sets being generated from location sensing technology. Offering a unique opportunity for learning about how different techniques are being used to develop new movement-aware applications, this reference work gives students, researchers and practitioners the opportunity to acquire new concepts in the production, awareness and use of sensors, data, and information products for supporting sustainable mobility.

This book covers the state of the art in learning algorithms with an inclusion of semi-supervised methods to provide a broad scope of clustering and classification solutions for big data applications. Case studies and best practices are included along with theoretical models of learning for a comprehensive reference to the field. The book is organized into eight chapters that cover the following topics: discretization, feature extraction and selection, classification, clustering, topic modeling, graph analysis and applications. Practitioners and graduate students can use the volume as an important reference for their current and future research and faculty will find the volume useful for assignments in presenting current approaches to unsupervised and semi-supervised learning in graduate-level seminar courses. The book is based on selected, expanded papers from the Fourth International Conference on Soft Computing in Data Science (2018). Includes new advances in clustering and classification using semi-supervised and unsupervised learning; Address new challenges arising in feature extraction and selection using semi-supervised and unsupervised learning; Features applications from healthcare, engineering, and text/social media mining that exploit techniques from semi-supervised and unsupervised learning.

In clear, readable language, consultant and researcher Kevin Desouza accomplishes an unlikely feat: explaining artificial intelligence to nonspecialists, in a way that experts will recognize and accept as correct and immediately applicable. Workers in knowledge management are relatively isolated from each other, businesspeople are still unconvinced that artificial intelligence has much to offer, and engineers creating the latest algorithm or device seldom consider its value for businesspeople--Desouza seeks to change all that.

He maintains that knowledge will be traded like physical goods, and that businesses must leverage knowledge resources within its organizations to survive in a highly competitive marketplace. Introducing us the concepts and significance of knowledge management, he shows that incorporating artificial intelligence computer-based techniques into business settings can provide truly significant gains in productivity. This book is among the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive one-stop guide to the basics of knowledge management, plus a lucid explanation of A.I., and how to use it in almost all types of organizational settings.

"Component Database Systems" is a collection of invited chapters by the researchers making the most influential contributions in the database industry's trend toward componentization

This book represents the sometimes-divergent, sometimes-convergent approaches taken by leading database vendors as they seek to establish commercially viable componentization strategies. Together, these contributions form the first book devoted entirely to the technical and architectural design of component-based database systems. In addition to detailing the current state of their research, the authors also take up many of the issues affecting the likely future directions of component databases.

If you have a stake in the evolution of any of today's leading database systems, this book will make fascinating reading. It will also help prepare you for the technology that is likely to become widely available over the next several years.
* Is comprised of contributions from the field's most highly respected researchers, including key figures at IBM, Oracle, Informix, Microsoft, and POET.
* Represents the entire spectrum of approaches taken by leading software companies working on DBMS componentization strategies.
* Covers component-focused architectures, methods for hooking components into an overall system, and support for component development.
* Examines the component technologies that are most valuable to Web-based and multimedia databases.
* Presents a thorough classification and overview of component database systems.

From Digital Traces to Algorithmic Projections describes individual digital fingerprints in interaction with the different algorithms they encounter throughout life. Centered on the human user, this formalism makes it possible to distinguish the voluntary projections of an individual and their systemic projections (suffered, metadata), both open (public) and closed. As the global algorithmic projection of an individual is now the focus of attention (Big Data, neuromarketing, targeted advertising, sentiment analysis, cybermonitoring, etc.) and is used to define new concepts, this resource discusses the ubiquity of place and the algorithmic consent of a user.

This book addresses the intellectual foundations, function, modeling approaches and complexity of cellular automata; explores cellular automata in combination with genetic algorithms, neural networks and agents; and discusses the applications of cellular automata in economics, traffic and the spread of disease. Pursuing a blended approach between knowledge and philosophy, it assigns equal value to methods and applications.

More and more, the advance of enterprise computing and cloud technologies means that managers are responsible for retrieving data ad-hoc and constructing business reports for decision-making and storytelling. The technical competencies necessary for such tasks can be daunting, and most database teaching methods do little to mitigate the confusion. They tend to follow traditional computer science methods that expose all computational and matrix theory complexities as well as various design theories, and in so doing, they present an excess of information that unnecessarily complicates the learning process for business-minded readers. Zygiaris simplifies his teaching method in order to provide an accessible walkthrough of all technological advances of databases in the business environment. Readers learn how to design, develop, and use databases to provide business analytical reports with the three major database management systems: Microsoft Access, Oracle Express and MariaDB (formerly MySQL). This is all delivered through clearly structured, streamlined chapters, all of which link to online videos that demonstrate visually, in step-by-step tutorials, how to implement the processes outlined in the book. All of these features help the non-IT student or manager to understand the importance of databases in the business environment and to learn how to use those databases to solve real-world problems. This book is of particular interest to students of management and to business managers, and it is of keen interest to anyone who works with major business database systems.

These proceedings present selected research papers from CISC'18, held in Wenzhou, China. The topics include Multi-Agent Systems, Networked Control Systems, Intelligent Robots, Complex System Theory and Swarm Behavior, Event-Triggered Control and Data-Driven Control, Robust and Adaptive Control, Big Data and Brain Science, Process Control, Nonlinear and Variable Structure Control, Intelligent Sensor and Detection Technology, Deep learning and Learning Control Guidance, Navigation and Control of Flight Vehicles, and so on. Engineers and researchers from academia, industry, and government can get an insight view of the solutions combining ideas from multiple disciplines in the field of intelligent systems.

This book provides a comprehensive review of complex networks from three different domains, presents novel methods for analyzing them, and highlights applications with accompanying case studies. Special emphasis is placed on three specific kinds of complex networks of high technological and scientific importance: software networks extracted from the source code of computer programs, ontology networks describing semantic web ontologies, and co-authorship networks reflecting collaboration in science. The book is primarily intended for researchers, teachers and students interested in complex networks and network data analysis. However, it will also be valuable for researchers dealing with software engineering, ontology engineering and scientometrics, as it demonstrates how complex network analysis can be used to address important research issues in these three disciplines.

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.

Describing the technologies to combine language resources flexibly as web services, this book provides valuable case studies for those who work in services computing, language resources, human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and service science. The authors have been operating the Language Grid, which wraps existing language resources as atomic language services and enables users to compose new services by combining them. From architecture level to service composition level, the book explains how to resolve infrastructural and operational difficulties in sharing and combining language resources, including interoperability of language service infrastructures, various types of language service policies, human services, and service failures.The research based on the authors' operating experiences of handling complicated issues such as intellectual property and interoperability of language resources contributes to exploitation of language resources as a service. On the other hand, both the analysis based on using services and the design of new services can bring significant results. A new style of multilingual communication supported by language services is worthy of analysis in HCI/CSCW, and the design process of language services is the focus of valuable case studies in service science. By using language resources in different ways based on the Language Grid, many activities are highly regarded by diverse communities. This book consists of four parts: (1) two types of language service platforms to interconnect language services across service grids, (2) various language service composition technologies that improve the reusability, efficiency, and accuracy of composite services, (3) research work and activities in creating language resources and services, and (4) various applications and tools for understanding and designing language services that well support intercultural collaboration.

Today's enterprises are increasingly going global by becoming more distributed, leveraging resource bases in all parts of the world. Whether through offshore relationships, global support or application development programs, or linking disparate parts of organizations, enterprises are reducing costs by managing applications centrally, boosting security, and assuring network uptime. The Handbook of Research on Global Information Technology Management in the Digital Economy provides comprehensive coverage and definitions of the most important issues, concepts, trends and technologies in the field of the emerging sub-discipline of global information technology management, covering topics such as the technical platform for global IS applications, information systems projects spanning cultures, managing information technology in multidomestic/ international/global/transnational corporations, and global information technology systems and socioeconomic development in developing countries. With 25 authoratative contributions from 34 of the world's leading experts, this publication is a must-have for academic and research libraries.