This book, written by an international team of prominent authors, gathers the latest developments in mobile technologies for the acquisition, management, analysis and sharing of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in the context of Earth observation. It is divided into three parts, the first of which presents case studies on the implementation of VGI for Earth observation, discusses the characteristics of volunteers' engagement in relation with their expertise and motivation, analyzes the tasks they are called upon to perform, and examines the available tools for developing VGI. In turn, the second part introduces readers to essential methods, techniques and algorithms used to develop mobile information systems based on VGI for distinct Earth observation tasks, while the last part focuses on the drawbacks and limitations of VGI with regard to the above-mentioned tasks and proposes innovative methods and techniques to help overcome them. Given its breadth of coverage, the book offers a comprehensive, practice-oriented reference guide for researchers and practitioners in the field of geo-information management.

This book covers the state-of-the-art in deep neural-network-based methods for noise robustness in distant speech recognition applications. It provides insights and detailed descriptions of some of the new concepts and key technologies in the field, including novel architectures for speech enhancement, microphone arrays, robust features, acoustic model adaptation, training data augmentation, and training criteria. The contributed chapters also include descriptions of real-world applications, benchmark tools and datasets widely used in the field. This book is intended for researchers and practitioners working in the field of speech processing and recognition who are interested in the latest deep learning techniques for noise robustness. It will also be of interest to graduate students in electrical engineering or computer science, who will find it a useful guide to this field of research.

This book presents the state of the art in designing high-performance algorithms that combine simulation and optimization in order to solve complex optimization problems in science and industry, problems that involve time-consuming simulations and expensive multi-objective function evaluations. As traditional optimization approaches are not applicable per se, combinations of computational intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing methods are popular solutions. But finding a suitable method is a challenging task, because numerous approaches have been proposed in this highly dynamic field of research. That's where this book comes in: It covers both theory and practice, drawing on the real-world insights gained by the contributing authors, all of whom are leading researchers. Given its scope, if offers a comprehensive reference guide for researchers, practitioners, and advanced-level students interested in using computational intelligence and machine learning to solve expensive optimization problems.

This book is devoted to one of the most famous examples of automation handling tasks - the "bin-picking" problem. To pick up objects, scrambled in a box is an easy task for humans, but its automation is very complex. In this book three different approaches to solve the bin-picking problem are described, showing how modern sensors can be used for efficient bin-picking as well as how classic sensor concepts can be applied for novel bin-picking techniques. 3D point clouds are firstly used as basis, employing the known Random Sample Matching algorithm paired with a very efficient depth map based collision avoidance mechanism resulting in a very robust bin-picking approach. Reducing the complexity of the sensor data, all computations are then done on depth maps. This allows the use of 2D image analysis techniques to fulfill the tasks and results in real time data analysis. Combined with force/torque and acceleration sensors, a near time optimal bin-picking system emerges. Lastly, surface normal maps are employed as a basis for pose estimation. In contrast to known approaches, the normal maps are not used for 3D data computation but directly for the object localization problem, enabling the application of a new class of sensors for bin-picking.

This book addresses agent-based computing, concentrating in particular on evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS), which have been developed since 1996 at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland. It provides the relevant background information on and a detailed description of this computing paradigm, along with key experimental results. Readers will benefit from the insightful discussion, which primarily concerns the efficient implementation of computing frameworks for developing EMAS and similar computing systems, as well as a detailed formal model. Theoretical deliberations demonstrating that computing with EMAS always helps to find the optimal solution are also included, rounding out the coverage.

This book explains advanced theoretical and application-related issues in grammatical inference, a research area inside the inductive inference paradigm for machine learning. The first three chapters of the book deal with issues regarding theoretical learning frameworks; the next four chapters focus on the main classes of formal languages according to Chomsky's hierarchy, in particular regular and context-free languages; and the final chapter addresses the processing of biosequences. The topics chosen are of foundational interest with relatively mature and established results, algorithms and conclusions. The book will be of value to researchers and graduate students in areas such as theoretical computer science, machine learning, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, and cognitive psychology who are engaged with the study of learning, especially of the structure underlying the concept to be learned. Some knowledge of mathematics and theoretical computer science, including formal language theory, automata theory, formal grammars, and algorithmics, is a prerequisite for reading this book.

This is the first book to explore how Semantic Web technologies (SWTs) can be used to create intelligent engineering applications (IEAs). Technology-specific chapters reflect the state of the art in relevant SWTs and offer guidelines on how they can be applied in multi-disciplinary engineering settings characteristic of engineering production systems. In addition, a selection of case studies from various engineering domains demonstrate how SWTs can be used to create IEAs that enable, for example, defect detection or constraint checking. Part I "Background and Requirements of Industrie 4.0 for Semantic Web Solutions" provides the background information needed to understand the book and addresses questions concerning the semantic challenges and requirements of Industrie 4.0, and which key SWT capabilities may be suitable for implementing engineering applications. In turn, Part II "Semantic Web-Enabled Data Integration in Multi-Disciplinary Engineering" focuses on how SWTs can be used for data integration in heterogeneous, multi-disciplinary engineering settings typically encountered in the creation of flexible production systems. Part III "Creating Intelligent Applications for Multi-Disciplinary Engineering" demonstrates how the integrated engineering data can be used to support the creation of IEAs, while Part IV "Related and Emerging Trends in the Use of Semantic Web in Engineering" presents an overview of the broader spectrum of approaches that make use of SWTs to support engineering settings. A final chapter then rounds out the book with an assessment of the strengths, weaknesses and compatibilities of SWTs and an outlook on future opportunities for applying SWTs to create IEAs in flexible industrial production systems. This book seeks to build a bridge between two communities: industrial production on one hand and Semantic Web on the other. Accordingly, stakeholders from both communities should find this book useful in their work. Semantic Web researchers will gain a better understanding of the challenges and requirements of the industrial production domain, offering them guidance in the development of new technologies and solutions for this important application area. In turn, engineers and managers from engineering domains will arrive at a firmer grasp of the benefits and limitations of using SWTs, helping them to select and adopt appropriate SWTs more effectively. In addition, researchers and students interested in industrial production-related issues will gain valuable insights into how and to what extent SWTs can help to address those issues.

This book covers aspects of human re-identification problems related to computer vision and machine learning. Working from a practical perspective, it introduces novel algorithms and designs for human re-identification that bridge the gap between research and reality. The primary focus is on building a robust, reliable, distributed and scalable smart surveillance system that can be deployed in real-world scenarios. This book also includes detailed discussions on pedestrian candidates detection, discriminative feature extraction and selection, dimension reduction, distance/metric learning, and decision/ranking enhancement.This book is intended for professionals and researchers working in computer vision and machine learning. Advanced-level students of computer science will also find the content valuable.

This edited volume on computational intelligence algorithms-based applications includes work presented at the International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communications, and Business Analytics (CICBA 2017). It provides the latest research findings on the significance of computational intelligence and related application areas. It also introduces various computation platforms involving evolutionary algorithms, fuzzy logic, swarm intelligence, artificial neural networks and several other tools for solving real-world problems. It also discusses various tools that are hybrids of more than one solution framework, highlighting the theoretical aspects as well as various real-world applications.

This book highlights cutting-edge research in the field of network science, offering scientists, researchers, students and practitioners a unique update on the latest advances in theory and a multitude of applications. It presents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the IX International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2020). The carefully selected papers cover a wide range of theoretical topics such as network models and measures; community structure, network dynamics; diffusion, epidemics and spreading processes; resilience and control as well as all the main network applications, including social and political networks; networks in finance and economics; biological and neuroscience networks and technological networks.

The most thrilling and challenging intellectual issues of humanity - whether and how a consistent account of reality can be obtained, which field of knowledge is capable to deal with the whole of reality and its formal representation, and how powerful intelligent machines can be brought into existence - are research areas demanding innovative and comprehensive study.""Reality, Universal Ontology and Knowledge Systems: Toward the Intelligent World"" provides cutting-edge research on reality, its nature and fundamental structure, and how it may be effectively represented both by human minds and intelligent machines. Striving to describe a standard world model and universal formal ontology, it offers a uniformly organized human knowledge. It includes powerful reasoning systems, and secure communication interoperability between two species of intelligences, as well as existing human beings and nascent computing reasoning systems promising the profound revolution in human values and ways of life.

This book explores the psychological impact of advanced forms of artificial intelligence. How will it be to live with a superior intelligence? How will the exposure to highly developed artificial intelligence (AI) systems change human well-being? With a review of recent advancements in brain-computer interfaces, military AI, Explainable AI (XAI) and digital clones as a foundation, the experience of living with a hyperintelligence is discussed from the viewpoint of a clinical psychologist. The theory of universal solicitation is introduced, i.e. the demand character of a technology that wants to be used in all aspects of life. With a focus on human experience, and to a lesser extent on technology, the book is written for a general readership with an interest in psychology, technology and the future of our human condition. With its unique focus on psychological topics, the book offers contributions to a discussion on the future of human life beyond purely technological considerations.

Two of the most important factors contributing to national and international economy are processing of information for accurate financial forecasting and decision making as well as processing of information for efficient control of manufacturing systems for increased productivity. The associated problems are very complex and conventional methods often fail to produce acceptable solutions. Moreover, businesses and industries always look for superior solutions to boost profitability and productivity. In recent times, artificial neural networks have demonstrated promising results in solving many real-world problems in these domains, and these techniques are increasingly gaining business and industry acceptance among the practitioners. ""Artificial Neural Networks in Finance and Manufacturing"" presents many state-of-the-art and diverse applications to finance and manufacturing, along with underlying neural network theories and architectures. It offers researchers and practitioners the opportunity to access exciting and cutting-edge research focusing on neural network applications, combining two aspects of economic domain in a single and consolidated volume.

This book proposes new algorithms to ensure secured communications and prevent unauthorized data exchange in secured multimedia systems. Focusing on numerous applications' algorithms and scenarios, it offers an in-depth analysis of data hiding technologies including watermarking, cryptography, encryption, copy control, and authentication. The authors present a framework for visual data hiding technologies that resolves emerging problems of modern multimedia applications in several contexts including the medical, healthcare, education, and wireless communication networking domains. Further, it introduces several intelligent security techniques with real-time implementation. As part of its comprehensive coverage, the book discusses contemporary multimedia authentication and fingerprinting techniques, while also proposing personal authentication/recognition systems based on hand images, surveillance system security using gait recognition, face recognition under restricted constraints such as dry/wet face conditions, and three-dimensional face identification using the approach developed here. This book equips perception technology professionals with the latest technologies, techniques, and strategies for multimedia security systems, offering a valuable resource for engineers and researchers working to develop security systems.

This book contains some selected papers from the International Conference on Extreme Learning Machine 2015, which was held in Hangzhou, China, December 15-17, 2015. This conference brought together researchers and engineers to share and exchange R&D experience on both theoretical studies and practical applications of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) technique and brain learning. This book covers theories, algorithms ad applications of ELM. It gives readers a glance of the most recent advances of ELM.

Graphic displays such as charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps play in important role today in the design and presentation of instructional materials education. There is also a strong need in scientific, technical and administrative fields to visually present facts, laws, principles etc. The increasing use of computer-based learning environments has also become an important field where the visual presentation of information plays a central role. Despite the importance of graphical displays as a means of communication and the fact that research about learning and cognition has advanced rapidly in the past two decades, the comprehension of graphics is still a rather unexplored area.

The comprehension of graphics is not only a stimulating topic in the fields of science and instructional psychology, but also in related disciplines such as semiotics, and artificial intelligence. Research on the comprehension of graphics complements the scientific investigation of cognitive processes in text comprehension, which has contributed much to our understanding of human cognition and learning. Ultimately, a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of graphics will have an impact not only on cognitive theory, but also on educational practice.

This book begins by briefly explaining learning automata (LA) models and a recently developed cellular learning automaton (CLA) named wavefront CLA. Analyzing social networks is increasingly important, so as to identify behavioral patterns in interactions among individuals and in the networks' evolution, and to develop the algorithms required for meaningful analysis. As an emerging artificial intelligence research area, learning automata (LA) has already had a significant impact in many areas of social networks. Here, the research areas related to learning and social networks are addressed from bibliometric and network analysis perspectives. In turn, the second part of the book highlights a range of LA-based applications addressing social network problems, from network sampling, community detection, link prediction, and trust management, to recommender systems and finally influence maximization. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable guide for all researchers whose work involves reinforcement learning, social networks and/or artificial intelligence.

This book brings together the latest findings on efficient solutions of multi/many-objective optimization problems from the leading researchers in the field. The focus is on solving real-world optimization problems using strategies ranging from evolutionary to hybrid frameworks, and involving various computation platforms. The topics covered include solution frameworks using evolutionary to hybrid models in application areas like Analytics, Cancer Research, Traffic Management, Networks and Communications, E-Governance, Quantum Technology, Image Processing, etc. As such, the book offers a valuable resource for all postgraduate students and researchers interested in exploring solution frameworks for multi/many-objective optimization problems.

Never before was anticipation more relevant to the life and activity of humankind than it is today. "It is no overstatement to suggest that humanity's future will be shaped by its capacity to anticipate...." (Research Agenda for the 21st Century, National Science Foundation). The sciences and the humanities can no longer risk explaining away the complexity and interactivity that lie at the foundation of life and living. The perspective of the world that anticipation opens justifies the descriptor "the post-Cartesian Revolution." If anticipation is a valid research domain, what practical relevance can we await? Indeed, anticipation is more than just the latest catch-word in marketing the apps developed by the digital technology industry. Due to spectacular advances in the study of the living, anticipation can claim a legitimate place in current investigations and applications in the sciences and the humanities. Biology, genetics, medicine, as well as politics and cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences, provide rich evidence of anticipatory processes at work. Readers seeking a foundation for an ticipation will find in these pages recent outcomes pertinent to plant life, political anticipation, cognitive science, architecture, computation. The authors contributing to this volume frame experimental data in language that can be shared among experts from all fields of endeavor. The major characteristic is the inference from the richness of data to principles and practical consequences.

The collected works of Turing, including a substantial amount of unpublished material, will comprise four volumes: Mechanical Intelligence, Pure Mathematics, Morphogenesis and Mathematical Logic. Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) was a brilliant man who made major contributions in several areas of science. Today his name is mentioned frequently in philosophical discussions about the nature of Artificial Intelligence. Actually, he was a pioneer researcher in computer architecture and software engineering; his work in pure mathematics and mathematical logic extended considerably further and his last work, on morphogenesis in plants, is also acknowledged as being of the greatest originality and of permanent importance. He was one of the leading figures in Twentieth-century science, a fact which would have been known to the general public sooner but for the British Official Secrets Act, which prevented discussion of his wartime work. What is maybe surprising about these papers is that although they were written decades ago, they address major issues which concern researchers today.

This book presents selected research and development on virtual reality (VR) and serious games (SG) applications to assist children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in their learning of different skills. Children with ASD have challenges to learn skills of learning, living, and working, due to their cognitive and behavioral limitations. The authors and their research teams of this book have many years' research experience developing innovative and interactive VR and SG technology for the special needs education. More specifically, several VR serious games are designed to train children with ASD on learning skill, life skill, and job skill. Such games are often developed based on the needs of special education and used by special needs schools in Singapore. This book is a useful resource for students, scholars, and designers of learning material who want to embrace VR and SG for children with ASD.

This book presents recently developed intelligent techniques with applications and theory in the area of quality management. The involved applications of intelligence include techniques such as fuzzy sets, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. The book consists of classical quality management topics dealing with intelligent techniques for solving the complex quality management problems. The book will serve as an excellent reference for quality managers, researchers, lecturers and postgraduate students in this area. The authors of the chapters are well-known researchers in the area of quality management.

This book opens with an introduction to the main purpose and tasks of the GIANA challenge, as well as a summary and an analysis of the results and performance obtained by the 20 participating teams. The early and accurate diagnosis of gastrointestinal diseases is critical for increasing the chances of patient survival, and efficient screening is vital for locating precursor lesions. Video colonoscopy and wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) are the gold-standard tools for colon and intestinal tract screening, respectively. Yet these tools still present some drawbacks, such as lesion miss rate, lack of in vivo diagnosis capabilities, and perforation risk. To mitigate these, computer-aided detection/diagnosis systems can play a key role in assisting clinicians in the different stages of the exploration. This book presents the latest, state-of-the-art approaches in this field, and also tackles the clinical considerations required to efficiently deploy these systems in the exploration room. The coverage draws upon results from the Gastrointestinal Image Analysis (GIANA) Challenge, part of the EndoVis satellite events of the conferences MICCAI 2017 and 2018. Each method proposed to address the different subtasks of the challenges is detailed in a separate chapter, offering a deep insight into this topic of interest for public health. This book appeals to researchers, practitioners, and lecturers spanning both the computer vision and gastroenterology communities.

This book discusses applications of blockchain in healthcare sector. The security of confidential and sensitive data is of utmost importance in healthcare industry. The introduction of blockchain methods in an effective manner will bring secure transactions in a peer-to-peer network. The book also covers gaps of the current available books/literature available for use cases of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in healthcare. The information and applications discussed in the book are immensely helpful for researchers, database professionals, and practitioners. The book also discusses protocols, standards, and government regulations which are very useful for policymakers.

This book proposes probabilistic machine learning models that represent the hardware properties of the device hosting them. These models can be used to evaluate the impact that a specific device configuration may have on resource consumption and performance of the machine learning task, with the overarching goal of balancing the two optimally. The book first motivates extreme-edge computing in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Then, it briefly reviews the steps involved in the execution of a machine learning task and identifies the implications associated with implementing this type of workload in resource-constrained devices. The core of this book focuses on augmenting and exploiting the properties of Bayesian Networks and Probabilistic Circuits in order to endow them with hardware-awareness. The proposed models can encode the properties of various device sub-systems that are typically not considered by other resource-aware strategies, bringing about resource-saving opportunities that traditional approaches fail to uncover. The performance of the proposed models and strategies is empirically evaluated for several use cases. All of the considered examples show the potential of attaining significant resource-saving opportunities with minimal accuracy losses at application time. Overall, this book constitutes a novel approach to hardware-algorithm co-optimization that further bridges the fields of Machine Learning and Electrical Engineering.