In this book, Haridimos Tsoukas, one of the most imaginative organization theorists of our time, examines the nature of knowledge in organizations, and how individuals and scholars approach the concept of knowledge. Tsoukas firstly looks at organizational knowledge and its embessedness in social contexts and forms of life. He shows that knowledge is not just a collection of free floating representations of the world to be used at will, but an activity constitute of the world. On the one hand, the organization as an institutionalized system does produce regularities that can be captured via propositional forms of knowledge. On the other, the organization as practice as a lifeworld, or as an open-ended system produce stories, values, and shared traditions which can only be captured by narrative forms of knowledge. Secondly, Tsoukas looks at the issue of how individuals deal with the notion of complexity in organizations: Our inability to reduce the behavior of complex organizations to their constituent parts. Drawing on concepts such as discourse, narrativity, and reflexivity, he adopts a hermeneutical approach to the issue. Finally, Tsoukas examines the concept of meta-knowledge, and how we know what we know. Arguing that the underlying representationalist epistemology of much of mainstream management causes many problems, he advocates adopting a more discursive approach. He describes what such an epistemology might be, and illustrates it with examples from organization studies and strategic management. An ideal introduction to the thinking of a leading organizational theorist, this book will be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students of Knowledge Management, Organization Studies, Management Studies, Business Strategy and Applied Epistemology.

Over the last several years there has been a growing interest in developing computational methodologies for modeling and analyzing movements and behaviors of 'crowds' of people. This interest spans several scientific areas that includes Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Pedestrian Evacuation Dynamics. Despite the fact that these different scientific fields are trying to model the same physical entity (i.e. a crowd of people), research ideas have evolved independently. As a result each discipline has developed techniques and perspectives that are characteristically their own. The goal of this book is to provide the readers a comprehensive map towards the common goal of better analyzing and synthesizing the pedestrian movement in dense, heterogeneous crowds. The book is organized into different parts that consolidate various aspects of research towards this common goal, namely the modeling, simulation, and visual analysis of crowds. Through this book, readers will see the common ideas and vision as well as the different challenges and techniques, that will stimulate novel approaches to fully grasping "crowds."

This book examines modern artificial intelligence to display how it may be applied to computer games. It spans the divide that exists between the academic research community working with advanced artificial intelligence and the games programming community which must create and release new and interesting games.

Vast amounts of data are nowadays collected, stored and processed, in an effort to assist in making a variety of administrative and governmental decisions. These innovative steps considerably improve the speed, effectiveness and quality of decisions. Analyses are increasingly performed by data mining and profiling technologies that statistically and automatically determine patterns and trends. However, when such practices lead to unwanted or unjustified selections, they may result in unacceptable forms of discrimination. Processing vast amounts of data may lead to situations in which data controllers know many of the characteristics, behaviors and whereabouts of people. In some cases, analysts might know more about individuals than these individuals know about themselves. Judging people by their digital identities sheds a different light on our views of privacy and data protection. This book discusses discrimination and privacy issues related to data mining and profiling practices. It provides technological and regulatory solutions, to problems which arise in these innovative contexts. The book explains that common measures for mitigating privacy and discrimination, such as access controls and anonymity, fail to properly resolve privacy and discrimination concerns. Therefore, new solutions, focusing on technology design, transparency and accountability are called for and set forth.

Imagine yourself as a military officer in a conflict zone trying to identify locations of weapons caches supporting road-side bomb attacks on your country's troops. Or imagine yourself as a public health expert trying to identify the location of contaminated water that is causing diarrheal diseases in a local population. Geospatial abduction is a new technique introduced by the authors that allows such problems to be solved. Geospatial Abduction provides the mathematics underlying geospatial abduction and the algorithms to solve them in practice; it has wide applicability and can be used by practitioners and researchers in many different fields. Real-world applications of geospatial abduction to military problems are included. Compelling examples drawn from other domains as diverse as criminology, epidemiology and archaeology are covered as well. This book also includes access to a dedicated website on geospatial abduction hosted by University of Maryland. Geospatial Abduction targets practitioners working in general AI, game theory, linear programming, data mining, machine learning, and more. Those working in the fields of computer science, mathematics, geoinformation, geological and biological science will also find this book valuable.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasing role in production and manufacturing engineering. Since a great deal of manufacturing knowledge can be put in the form of rules, expert systems have emerged as a promising practical tool of AI for solving engineering problems. Expert systems allow knowledge to be used for constructing human-machine systems that have specialized methods and techniques for solving problems in practical application areas. This book contains the structure and rules for 15 expert systems dealing with various aspects of production and manufacturing engineering. Topics covered range from casting design evaluation through to quality control. All expert systems included are accompanied by description of their structure and the rules are included on floppy disc in ASCII that can be readily accessed. These expert systems are generic in nature and readers should find it possible to modify these expert systems for their own specific applications.

Counting belongs to the most elementary and frequent mental activities of human beings. Its results are a basis for coming to a decision in a lot of situations and dimensions of our life. This book presents a novel approach to the advanced and sophisticated case, called intelligent counting, in which the objects of counting are imprecisely, fuzzily specified. Formally, this collapses to counting in fuzzy sets, interval-valued fuzzy sets or I-fuzzy sets (Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets). The monograph is the first one showing and emphasizing that the presented methods of intelligent counting are human-consistent: are reflections and formalizations of real, human counting procedures performed under imprecision and, possibly, incompleteness of information. Other applications of intelligent counting in various areas of intelligent systems and decision support will be discussed, too. The whole presentation is self-contained, systematic, and equipped with many examples, figures and tables. Computer and information scientists, researchers, engineers and practitioners, applied mathematicians, and postgraduate students interested in information imprecision are the target readers.

In this book, the editors explain how students enrolled in two digital forensic courses at their institution are exposed to experiential learning opportunities, where the students acquire the knowledge and skills of the subject-matter while also learning how to adapt to the ever-changing digital forensic landscape. Their findings (e.g., forensic examination of different IoT devices) are also presented in the book. Digital forensics is a topic of increasing importance as our society becomes "smarter" with more of the "things" around us been internet- and inter-connected (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home devices); thus, the increasing likelihood that we will need to acquire data from these things in a forensically sound manner. This book is of interest to both digital forensic educators and digital forensic practitioners, as well as students seeking to learn about digital forensics.

(Preliminary): The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) digital transmission technique has several advantages in broadcast and mobile communications applications. The main objective of this book is to give a good insight into these efforts, and provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of the scientific progress which was achieved in the last decade. Besides topics of the physical layer, such as coding, modulation and non-linearities, a special emphasis is put on system aspects and concepts, in particular regarding cellular networks and using multiple antenna techniques. The work extensively addresses challenges of link adaptation, adaptive resource allocation and interference mitigation in such systems. Moreover, the domain of cross-layer design, i.e. the combination of physical layer aspects and issues of higher layers, are considered in detail. These results will facilitate and stimulate further innovation and development in the design of modern communication systems, based on the powerful OFDM transmission technique.

This volume includes papers presented at IIH-MSP 2017, the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing, held from 12 to 15 August 2017 in Matsue, Shimane, Japan. The conference addresses topics ranging from information hiding and security, and multimedia signal processing and networking, to bio-inspired multimedia technologies and systems. This volume of Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies focuses on subjects related to massive image/video compression and transmission for emerging networks, advances in speech and language processing, information hiding and signal processing for audio and speech signals, intelligent distribution systems and applications, recent advances in security and privacy for multimodal network environments, multimedia signal processing, and machine learning. Updated with the latest research outcomes and findings, the papers presented appeal to researchers and students who are interested in the corresponding fields.

This book explores cybersecurity research and development efforts, including ideas that deal with the growing challenge of how computing engineering can merge with neuroscience. The contributing authors, who are renowned leaders in this field, thoroughly examine new technologies that will automate security procedures and perform autonomous functions with decision making capabilities. To maximize reader insight into the range of professions dealing with increased cybersecurity issues, this book presents work performed by government, industry, and academic research institutions working at the frontier of cybersecurity and network sciences. Cybersecurity Systems for Human Cognition Augmentation is designed as a reference for practitioners or government employees working in cybersecurity. Advanced-level students or researchers focused on computer engineering or neuroscience will also find this book a useful resource.

This book presents powerful techniques for solving global optimization problems on manifolds by means of evolutionary algorithms, and shows in practice how these techniques can be applied to solve real-world problems. It describes recent findings and well-known key facts in general and differential topology, revisiting them all in the context of application to current optimization problems. Special emphasis is put on game theory problems. Here, these problems are reformulated as constrained global optimization tasks and solved with the help of Fuzzy ASA. In addition, more abstract examples, including minimizations of well-known functions, are also included. Although the Fuzzy ASA approach has been chosen as the main optimizing paradigm, the book suggests that other metaheuristic methods could be used as well. Some of them are introduced, together with their advantages and disadvantages. Readers should possess some knowledge of linear algebra, and of basic concepts of numerical analysis and probability theory. Many necessary definitions and fundamental results are provided, with the formal mathematical requirements limited to a minimum, while the focus is kept firmly on continuous problems. The book offers a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners. It is suitable for university courses on optimization and for self-study.

Remarkable progress in eye-tracking technologies opened the way to design novel attention-based intelligent user interfaces, and highlighted the importance of better understanding of eye-gaze in human-computer interaction and human-human communication. For instance, a user's focus of attention is useful in interpreting the user's intentions, their understanding of the conversation, and their attitude towards the conversation. In human face-to-face communication, eye gaze plays an important role in floor management, grounding, and engagement in conversation. Eye Gaze in Intelligent User Interfaces draws on ideas from a number of contributors working on how attentional information can be applied to novel intelligent interfaces. Part I focuses on analyzing human eye gaze behaviors to reveal characteristics of human communication and cognition; Part II addresses estimation and prediction of the cognitive state of the users using gaze information; and Part III presents proposals of novel gaze-aware interfaces which integrate eye-trackers as a system component. The contributions highlight a direction for the future of human-computer interaction, and discuss issues in human attentional behaviors and face-to-face communication which are essential in designing gaze aware interactive interfaces.

This book consists of 20 chapters in which the authors deal with different theoretical and practical aspects of new trends in Collective Computational Intelligence techniques. Computational Collective Intelligence methods and algorithms are one the current trending research topics from areas related to Artificial Intelligence, Soft Computing or Data Mining among others. Computational Collective Intelligence is a rapidly growing field that is most often understood as an AI sub-field dealing with soft computing methods which enable making group decisions and processing knowledge among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. Web-based Systems, Social Networks, and Multi-Agent Systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. The chapters included in this volume cover a selection of topics and new trends in several domains related to Collective Computational Intelligence: Language and Knowledge Processing, Data Mining Methods and Applications, Computer Vision, and Intelligent Computational Methods. This book will be useful for graduate and PhD students in computer science as well as for mature academics, researchers and practitioners interested in the methods and applications of collective computational intelligence in order to create new intelligent systems.

One of the most successful methodology that arose from the worldwide diffusion of Fuzzy Logic is Fuzzy Control. After the first attempts dated in the seventies, this methodology has been widely exploited for controlling many industrial components and systems. At the same time, and very independently from Fuzzy Logic or Fuzzy Control, the birth of the Web has impacted upon almost all aspects of computing discipline. Evolution of Web, Web2.0 and Web 3.0 has been making scenarios of ubiquitous computing much more feasible; consequently information technology has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities.

What happens when Fuzzy Logic meets Web technology? Interesting results might come out, as you will discover in this book. Fuzzy Mark-up Language is a son of this synergistic view, where some technological issues of Web are re-interpreted taking into account the transparent notion of Fuzzy Control, as discussed here. The concept of a Fuzzy Control that is conceived and modeled in terms of a native web wisdom represents another step towards the last picture of Pervasive Web Intelligence.

This book introduces the novel concept of a fuzzy network whose nodes are rule bases and the connections between the nodes are the interactions between the rule bases in the form of outputs fed as inputs. The concept is presented as a systematic study for improving the feasibility and transparency of fuzzy models by means of modular rule bases whereby the model accuracy and efficiency can be optimised in a flexible way. The study uses an effective approach for fuzzy rule based modelling of complex systems that are characterised by attributes such as nonlinearity, uncertainty, dimensionality and structure.The approach is illustrated by formal models for fuzzy networks, basic and advanced operations on network nodes, properties of operations, feedforward and feedback fuzzy networks as well as evaluation of fuzzy networks. The results are demonstrated by numerous examples, two case studies and software programmes within the Matlab environment that implement some of the theoretical methods from the book. The book shows the novel concept of a fuzzy network with networked rule bases as a bridge between the existing concepts of a standard fuzzy system with a single rule base and a hierarchical fuzzy system with multiple rule bases.

As technology continues to develop, certain innovations are beginning to cover a wide range of applications, specifically mobile robotic systems. The boundaries between the various automation methods and their implementations are not strictly defined, with overlaps occurring. Specificity is required regarding the research and development of android systems and how they pertain to modern science. Control and Signal Processing Applications for Mobile and Aerial Robotic Systems is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the current state of control and signal processing of portable robotic designs. While highlighting topics such as digital systems, control theory, and mathematical methods, this publication explores original inquiry contributions and the instrumentation of mechanical systems in the industrial and scientific fields. This book is ideally designed for technicians, engineers, industry specialists, researchers, academicians, and students seeking current research on today's execution of mobile robotic schemes.

The book puts special stress on the contemporary techniques for reasoning-based image processing and analysis: learning based image representation and advanced video coding; intelligent image processing and analysis in medical vision systems; similarity learning models for image reconstruction; visual perception for mobile robot motion control, simulation of human brain activity in the analysis of video sequences; shape-based invariant features extraction; essential of paraconsistent neural networks, creativity and intelligent representation in computational systems. The book comprises 14 chapters. Each chapter is a small monograph, representing resent investigations of authors in the area. The topics of the chapters cover wide scientific and application areas and complement each-other very well. The chapters' content is based on fundamental theoretical presentations, followed by experimental results and comparison with similar techniques. The size of the chapters is well-ballanced which permits a thorough presentation of the investigated problems. The authors are from universities and R&D institutions all over the world; some of the chapters are prepared by international teams. The book will be of use for university and PhD students, researchers and software developers working in the area of digital image and video processing and analysis.

Biological and other natural processes have always been a source of inspiration for computer science and information technology. Many emerging problem solving techniques integrate advanced evolution and cooperation strategies, encompassing a range of spatio-temporal scales for visionary conceptualization of evolutionary computation.

The previous editions of NICSO were held in Granada, Spain (2006), Acireale, Italy (2007), Tenerife, Spain (2008), and again in Granada in 2010. NICSO evolved to be one of the most interesting and profiled workshops in nature inspired computing.

NICSO 2011 has offered an inspiring environment for debating the state of the art ideas and techniques in nature inspired cooperative strategies and a comprehensive image on recent applications of these ideas and techniques.

The topics covered by this volume include Swarm Intelligence (such as Ant and Bee Colony Optimization), Genetic Algorithms, Multiagent Systems, Coevolution and Cooperation strategies, Adversarial Models, Synergic Building Blocks, Complex Networks, Social Impact Models, Evolutionary Design, Self Organized Criticality, Evolving Systems, Cellular Automata, Hybrid Algorithms, and Membrane Computing (P-Systems).

This book primarily illustrates the rationale, design and technical realization/verification for the cooperative guidance and control systems (CGCSs) of missile autonomous formation (MAF). From the seven functions to the five major compositions of CGCS, the book systematically explains the theory and modeling, analysis, synthesis and design of CGCSs for MAF, including bionics-based theories. Further, the book addresses how to create corresponding digital simulation analysis systems, as well as hardware in the loop (HIL) simulation test systems and flight test systems, to evaluate the combat effectiveness of MAF. Lastly, it provides detailed information on digital simulation analysis for a large range of wind tunnel test data, as well as test results of HIL system simulations and embedded systems testing.