This book focuses on the advanced soft computational and probabilistic methods that the authors have published over the past few years. It describes theoretical results and applications, and discusses how various uncertainty measures - probability, plausibility and belief measures - can be treated in a unified way. It also examines approximations of four notable probability distributions (Weibull, exponential, logistic and normal) using a unified probability distribution function, and presents a fuzzy arithmetic-based time series model that provides an easy-to-use forecasting technique. Lastly, it proposes flexible fuzzy numbers for Likert scale-based evaluations. Featuring methods that can be successfully applied in a variety of areas, including engineering, economics, biology and the medical sciences, the book offers useful guidelines for practitioners and researchers.

This book presents recent research in the recognition of vulnerabilities of national systems and assets which gained special attention for the Critical Infrastructures in the last two decades. The book concentrates on R&D activities in the relation of Critical Infrastructures focusing on enhancing the performance of services as well as the level of security. The objectives of the book are based on a project entitled "Critical Infrastructure Protection Researches" (TAMOP-4.2.1.B-11/2/KMR-2011-0001) which concentrated on innovative UAV solutions, robotics, cybersecurity, surface engineering, and mechatornics and technologies providing safe operations of essential assets. This report is summarizing the methodologies and efforts taken to fulfill the goals defined. The project has been performed by the consortium of the Obuda University and the National University of Public Service.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of computational intelligence methods for semantic knowledge management. Contrary to popular belief, the methods for semantic management of information were created several decades ago, long before the birth of the Internet. In fact, it was back in 1945 when Vannevar Bush introduced the idea for the first protohypertext: the MEMEX (MEMory + indEX) machine. In the years that followed, Bush's idea influenced the development of early hypertext systems until, in the 1980s, Tim Berners Lee developed the idea of the World Wide Web (WWW) as it is known today. From then on, there was an exponential growth in research and industrial activities related to the semantic management of the information and its exploitation in different application domains, such as healthcare, e-learning and energy management. However, semantics methods are not yet able to address some of the problems that naturally characterize knowledge management, such as the vagueness and uncertainty of information. This book reveals how computational intelligence methodologies, due to their natural inclination to deal with imprecision and partial truth, are opening new positive scenarios for designing innovative semantic knowledge management architectures.

This book provides a timely and comprehensive study of dynamic resource management for network slicing in service-oriented fifth-generation (5G) and beyond core networks. This includes the perspective of developing efficient computation resource provisioning and scheduling solutions to guarantee consistent service performance in terms of end-to-end (E2E) data delivery delay. Network slicing is enabled by the software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) paradigms. For a network slice with a target traffic load, the E2E service delivery is enabled by virtual network function (VNF) placement and traffic routing with static resource allocations. When data traffic enters the network, the traffic load is dynamic and can deviate from the target value, potentially leading to QoS performance degradation and network congestion. Data traffic has dynamics in different time granularities. For example, the traffic statistics (e.g., mean and variance) can be non-stationary and experience significant changes in a coarse time granularity, which are usually predictable. Within a long time duration with stationary traffic statistics, there are traffic dynamics in small timescales, which are usually highly bursty and unpredictable. To provide continuous QoS performance guarantee and ensure efficient and fair operation of the network slices over time, it is essential to develop dynamic resource management schemes for the embedded services in the presence of traffic dynamics during virtual network operation. Queueing theory is used in system modeling, and different techniques including optimization and machine learning are applied to solving the dynamic resource management problems. Based on a simplified M/M/1 queueing model with Poisson traffic arrivals, an optimization model for flow migration is presented to accommodate the large-timescale changes in the average traffic rates with average E2E delay guarantee, while addressing a trade-off between load balancing and flow migration overhead. To overcome the limitations of Poisson traffic model, the authors present a machine learning approach for dynamic VNF resource scaling and migration. The new solution captures the inherent traffic patterns in a real-world traffic trace with non-stationary traffic statistics in large timescale, predicts resource demands for VNF resource scaling, and triggers adaptive VNF migration decision making, to achieve load balancing, migration cost reduction, and resource overloading penalty suppression in the long run. Both supervised and unsupervised machine learning tools are investigated for dynamic resource management. To accommodate the traffic dynamics in small time granularities, the authors present a dynamic VNF scheduling scheme to coordinate the scheduling among VNFs of multiple services, which achieves network utility maximization with delay guarantee for each service. Researchers and graduate students working in the areas of electrical engineering, computing engineering and computer science will find this book useful as a reference or secondary text. Professionals in industry seeking solutions to dynamic resource management for 5G and beyond networks will also want to purchase this book.

This book shows that the term "interpretability" goes far beyond the concept of readability of a fuzzy set and fuzzy rules. It focuses on novel and precise operators of aggregation, inference, and defuzzification leading to flexible Mamdani-type and logical-type systems that can achieve the required accuracy using a less complex rule base. The individual chapters describe various aspects of interpretability, including appropriate selection of the structure of a fuzzy system, focusing on improving the interpretability of fuzzy systems designed using both gradient-learning and evolutionary algorithms. It also demonstrates how to eliminate various system components, such as inputs, rules and fuzzy sets, whose reduction does not adversely affect system accuracy. It illustrates the performance of the developed algorithms and methods with commonly used benchmarks. The book provides valuable tools for possible applications in many fields including expert systems, automatic control and robotics.

This edited volume focuses on big data implications for computational social science and humanities from management to usage. The first part of the book covers geographic data, text corpus data, and social media data, and exemplifies their concrete applications in a wide range of fields including anthropology, economics, finance, geography, history, linguistics, political science, psychology, public health, and mass communications. The second part of the book provides a panoramic view of the development of big data in the fields of computational social sciences and humanities. The following questions are addressed: why is there a need for novel data governance for this new type of data?, why is big data important for social scientists?, and how will it revolutionize the way social scientists conduct research? With the advent of the information age and technologies such as Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing, wearable devices, and the Internet of Things, digital society has fundamentally changed what we now know as "data", the very use of this data, and what we now call "knowledge". Big data has become the standard in social sciences, and has made these sciences more computational. Big Data in Computational Social Science and Humanities will appeal to graduate students and researchers working in the many subfields of the social sciences and humanities.

The universe is a massive system of systems - for example, ecological systems, social systems, commodity and stock markets. These systems are complex, constantly adapting to their environment, and many are essential to the very existence of human beings. To fully understand these systems, complex adaptive systems research uses systemic inquiry to build multi-level and multidisciplinary representations of reality to study these systems.""Applications of Complex Adaptive Systems"" provides a global view of the most up-to-date research on the strategies, applications, practice, and implications of complex adaptive systems, to better understand the various critical systems that surround human life. Researchers working in the field of complex adaptive systems and related fields such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and data mining, as well as professionals in related applications such as defense, bioinformatics, and sociology will find this book an indispensable, state-of-the-art reference.

Continuous developments in software and intelligence sciences have brought together the studies of both natural and machine intelligence and the relationship between the function of the brain and the abstract soft mind; creating a new multidisciplinary field of study. Advances in Abstract Intelligence and Soft Computing brings together the latest research in computer science: theoretical software engineering, cognitive science and informatics, and also their influence on the processes of natural and machine intelligence. This book is a collection of widespread research in the constant expansions on this emerging discipline.

This book provides fresh insights into the cutting edge of multimedia data mining, reflecting how the research focus has shifted towards networked social communities, mobile devices and sensors. The work describes how the history of multimedia data processing can be viewed as a sequence of disruptive innovations. Across the chapters, the discussion covers the practical frameworks, libraries, and open source software that enable the development of ground-breaking research into practical applications. Features: reviews how innovations in mobile, social, cognitive, cloud and organic based computing impacts upon the development of multimedia data mining; provides practical details on implementing the technology for solving real-world problems; includes chapters devoted to privacy issues in multimedia social environments and large-scale biometric data processing; covers content and concept based multimedia search and advanced algorithms for multimedia data representation, processing and visualization.

This cutting-edge book presents the theory and practice of the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR), which is used for strategically investigating disputes in any field to enable informed decision making. It clearly explains how GMCR can determine what is the best a particular decision maker (DM) can independently achieve in dynamic interaction with others. Moves and counter-moves follow various stability definitions reflecting human behavior under conflict. The book defines a wide range of preference structures to represent a DM's comparisons of states or scenarios: equally preferred, more or less preferred; unknown; degrees of strength of preference; and hybrid. It vividly describes how GMCR can ascertain whether a DM can fare even better by cooperating with others in a coalition. The book portrays how a conflict can evolve from the status quo to a desirable resolution, and provides a universal design for a decision support system to implement the innovative decision technologies using the matrix formulation of GMCR. Further, it illustrates the key ideas using real-world conflicts and supplies problems at the end of each chapter. As such, this highly instructive book benefits teachers, mentors, students and practitioners in any area where conflict arises.

The original concept for the Vision in Vehicle series of international conferences was born from discussions within the Applied Vision Association which led eventually to the first conference being held in 1985. Ten years of progress later and this volume presents the selected and edited proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Vision in Vehicles (VIV6) which was held at the University of Derby, 13-16 September 1995. The meeting was organised in association with the Applied Vision Association and the Ergonomics Society.
The conference is unique in the eclectic mix of disciplines which are attracted to the meetings and this enables research inssues to be considered in very broad contexts.

This book presents the features and advantages offered by complex networks in the machine learning domain. In the first part, an overview on complex networks and network-based machine learning is presented, offering necessary background material. In the second part, we describe in details some specific techniques based on complex networks for supervised, non-supervised, and semi-supervised learning. Particularly, a stochastic particle competition technique for both non-supervised and semi-supervised learning using a stochastic nonlinear dynamical system is described in details. Moreover, an analytical analysis is supplied, which enables one to predict the behavior of the proposed technique. In addition, data reliability issues are explored in semi-supervised learning. Such matter has practical importance and is not often found in the literature. With the goal of validating these techniques for solving real problems, simulations on broadly accepted databases are conducted. Still in this book, we present a hybrid supervised classification technique that combines both low and high orders of learning. The low level term can be implemented by any classification technique, while the high level term is realized by the extraction of features of the underlying network constructed from the input data. Thus, the former classifies the test instances by their physical features, while the latter measures the compliance of the test instances with the pattern formation of the data. We show that the high level technique can realize classification according to the semantic meaning of the data. This book intends to combine two widely studied research areas, machine learning and complex networks, which in turn will generate broad interests to scientific community, mainly to computer science and engineering areas.

This book describes the development of an integrated approach for generating the path and gait of realistic hexapod robotic systems. It discusses in detail locomation with straight-ahead, crab and turning motion capabilities in varying terrains, like sloping surfaces, staircases, and various user-defined rough terrains. It also presents computer simulations and validation using Virtual Prototyping (VP) tools and real-world experiments. The book also explores improving solutions by applying the developed nonlinear, constrained inverse dynamics model of the system formulated as a coupled dynamical problem based on the Newton-Euler (NE) approach and taking into account realistic environmental conditions. The approach is developed on the basis of rigid multi-body modelling and the concept that there is no change in the configuration of the system in the short time span of collisions.

This thesis develops several systematic and unified approaches for analyzing dynamic systems with positive characteristics or a more general cone invariance property. Based on these analysis results, it uses linear programming tools to address static output feedback synthesis problems with a focus on optimal gain performances. Owing to their low computational complexity, the established controller design algorithms are applicable for large-scale systems. The theory and control strategies developed will not only be useful in handling large-scale positive delay systems with improved solvability and at lower cost, but also further our understanding of the system characteristics in other related areas, such as distributed coordination of networked multi-agent systems, formation control of multiple robots.

This book examines the introduction of smart technologies into public administrations and the organizational issues caused by these implementations, and the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to rationalize and improve government, transform governance and organizational issues, and address economic, social, and environmental challenges. Cities are increasingly using new technologies in the delivery of public sector services and in the improvement of government transparency, business-led urban development, and urban sustainability. The book will examine specific smart projects that cities are embracing to improve transparency, efficiency, sustainability, mobility, and whether all cities are prepared to implement smart technologies and the incentives for promoting implementation. This focus on the smart technologies applied to public sector entities will be of interest to academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations and technical experts involved in and responsible for the governance, development and design of Smart Cities.

This provides a comprehensive overview of the key principles of security concerns surrounding the upcoming Internet of Things (IoT), and introduces readers to the protocols adopted in the IoT. It also analyses the vulnerabilities, attacks and defense mechanisms, highlighting the security issues in the context of big data. Lastly, trust management approaches and ubiquitous learning applications are examined in detail. As such, the book sets the stage for developing and securing IoT applications both today and in the future.

This book presents a unique approach to stream data mining. Unlike the vast majority of previous approaches, which are largely based on heuristics, it highlights methods and algorithms that are mathematically justified. First, it describes how to adapt static decision trees to accommodate data streams; in this regard, new splitting criteria are developed to guarantee that they are asymptotically equivalent to the classical batch tree. Moreover, new decision trees are designed, leading to the original concept of hybrid trees. In turn, nonparametric techniques based on Parzen kernels and orthogonal series are employed to address concept drift in the problem of non-stationary regressions and classification in a time-varying environment. Lastly, an extremely challenging problem that involves designing ensembles and automatically choosing their sizes is described and solved. Given its scope, the book is intended for a professional audience of researchers and practitioners who deal with stream data, e.g. in telecommunication, banking, and sensor networks.

This book summarizes the research findings presented at the 13th International Joint Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering (JCKBSE 2020), which took place on August 24-26, 2020. JCKBSE 2020 was originally planned to take place in Larnaca, Cyprus. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic forced it be rescheduled as an online conference. JCKBSE is a well-established, international, biennial conference that focuses on the applications of artificial intelligence in software engineering. The 2020 edition of the conference was organized by Hiroyuki Nakagawa, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, Japan, and George A. Tsihrintzis and Maria Virvou, Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Greece. This research book is a valuable resource for experts and researchers in the field of (knowledge-based) software engineering, as well as general readers in the fields of artificial and computational Intelligence and, more generally, computer science wanting to learn more about the field of (knowledge-based) software engineering and its applications. An extensive list of bibliographic references at the end of each paper helps readers to probe further into the application areas of interest to them.

The field of mechatronics (which is the synergistic combination of precision mechanical engineering, electronic control and systems thinking in the design of products and manufacturing processes) is gaining much attention in industries and academics. It was detected that the topics of computer vision, control and robotics are imperative for the successful of mechatronics systems. This book includes several chapters which report successful study cases about computer vision, control and robotics. The readers will have the latest information related to mechatronics, that contains the details of implementation, and the description of the test scenarios.

This book introduces the challenges of robotic tactile perception and task understanding, and describes an advanced approach based on machine learning and sparse coding techniques. Further, a set of structured sparse coding models is developed to address the issues of dynamic tactile sensing. The book then proves that the proposed framework is effective in solving the problems of multi-finger tactile object recognition, multi-label tactile adjective recognition and multi-category material analysis, which are all challenging practical problems in the fields of robotics and automation. The proposed sparse coding model can be used to tackle the challenging visual-tactile fusion recognition problem, and the book develops a series of efficient optimization algorithms to implement the model. It is suitable as a reference book for graduate students with a basic knowledge of machine learning as well as professional researchers interested in robotic tactile perception and understanding, and machine learning.

Agent technology has recently become one of the most vibrant and fastest growing areas in information technology. And advanced digital communicatiion is a central enabling technology for the coming information society. So software agents and their exploitation for future communication systems are attracting particular attention from the research and development community as well as from economic and user communities interested in everyday private and professional digital communication applications. This monograph-like anthology is the first systematic introduction to software agents and future communication systems. Fifteen coherently written chapters by leading software agent researchers provide complementary coverage of the relevant issues. Multi-agent systems and mobile agent approaches are presented in a well-balanced way and applied to most important topics in future communication systems. In addition, the volume editors have provided a detailed introductory survey chapters.

This is the third book presenting selected results of research on the further development of the shape understanding system (SUS) carried out by authors in the newly founded Queen Jadwiga Research Institute of Understanding. In this book the new term Machine Understanding is introduced referring to a new area of research aiming to investigate the possibility of building machines with the ability to understand. It is presented that SUS needs to some extent mimic human understanding and for this reason machines are evaluated according to the rules applied for the evaluation of human understanding. The book shows how to formulate problems and how it can be tested if the machine is able to solve these problems.

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

This edited book presents the scientific outcomes of the 19th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD 2018), which was held in Busan, Korea on June 27-29, 2018. The aim of this conference was to bring together researchers and scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, computer users and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science and to share their experiences and exchange new ideas and information in a meaningful way. The book includes research findings on all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science and discusses the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to respond to them. The book includes 13 of the conference's most promising papers.