The book presents recent trends and solutions to help healthcare sectors and medical staff protect themselves and others and limit the spread of the COVID-19. The book also presents the problems and challenges researchers and academics face in tackling this monumental task. Topics include: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or drones that can be used to detect infected people in different areas; robots used in fighting the COVID-19 by protecting workers and staff dealing with infected people; blockchain technology that secures sensitive transactions in strict confidentiality. With contributions from experts from around the world, this book aims to help those creating and honing technology to help with this global threat.

This book shows cognitive scientists in training how mathematics, computer science and science can be usefully and seamlessly intertwined. It is a follow-up to the first two volumes on mathematics for cognitive scientists, and includes the mathematics and computational tools needed to understand how to compute the terms in the Fourier series expansions that solve the cable equation. The latter is derived from first principles by going back to cellular biology and the relevant biophysics. A detailed discussion of ion movement through cellular membranes, and an explanation of how the equations that govern such ion movement leading to the standard transient cable equation are included. There are also solutions for the cable model using separation of variables, as well an explanation of why Fourier series converge and a description of the implementation of MatLab tools to compute the solutions. Finally, the standard Hodgkin - Huxley model is developed for an excitable neuron and is solved using MatLab.

This book describes how the principle of self-sufficiency can be applied to a reconfigurable modular robotic organism. It shows the design considerations for a novel REPLICATOR robotic platform, both hardware and software, featuring the behavioral characteristics of social insect colonies. Following a comprehensive overview of some of the bio-inspired techniques already available, and of the state-of-the-art in re-configurable modular robotic systems, the book presents a novel power management system with fault-tolerant energy sharing, as well as its implementation in the REPLICATOR robotic modules. In addition, the book discusses, for the first time, the concept of "artificial energy homeostasis" in the context of a modular robotic organism, and shows its verification on a custom-designed simulation framework in different dynamic power distribution and fault tolerance scenarios. This book offers an ideal reference guide for both hardware engineers and software developers involved in the design and implementation of autonomous robotic systems.

This book gathers selected high-quality papers presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning and Computational Intelligence (ICMLCI-2019), jointly organized by Kunming University of Science and Technology and the Interscience Research Network, Bhubaneswar, India, from April 6 to 7, 2019. Addressing virtually all aspects of intelligent systems, soft computing and machine learning, the topics covered include: prediction; data mining; information retrieval; game playing; robotics; learning methods; pattern visualization; automated knowledge acquisition; fuzzy, stochastic and probabilistic computing; neural computing; big data; social networks and applications of soft computing in various areas.

The book presents research that contributes to the development of intelligent dialog systems to simplify diverse aspects of everyday life, such as medical diagnosis and entertainment. Covering major thematic areas: machine learning and artificial neural networks; algorithms and models; and social and biometric data for applications in human-computer interfaces, it discusses processing of audio-visual signals for the detection of user-perceived states, the latest scientific discoveries in processing verbal (lexicon, syntax, and pragmatics), auditory (voice, intonation, vocal expressions) and visual signals (gestures, body language, facial expressions), as well as algorithms for detecting communication disorders, remote health-status monitoring, sentiment and affect analysis, social behaviors and engagement. Further, it examines neural and machine learning algorithms for the implementation of advanced telecommunication systems, communication with people with special needs, emotion modulation by computer contents, advanced sensors for tracking changes in real-life and automatic systems, as well as the development of advanced human-computer interfaces. The book does not focus on solving a particular problem, but instead describes the results of research that has positive effects in different fields and applications.

This book focuses on a combination of theoretical advances in the Internet of Things, cloud computing and its real-life applications to serve society. The book discusses technological innovations, authentication, mobility support and security, group rekeying schemes and a range of concrete applications. The Internet has restructured not only global interrelations, but also an unbelievable number of personal characteristics. Machines are increasingly able to control innumerable autonomous gadgets via the Internet, creating the Internet of Things, which facilitates intelligent communication between humans and things, and among things. The Internet of Things is an active area of current research, and technological advances have been supported by real-life applications to establish their soundness. The material in this book includes concepts, figures, graphs, and tables to guide researchers through the Internet of Things and its applications for society.

This book delivers a definite and compact knowledge on how hybridization can help improving the quality of computer classification systems. In order to make readers clearly realize the knowledge of hybridization, this book primarily focuses on introducing the different levels of hybridization and illuminating what problems we will face with as dealing with such projects. In the first instance the data and knowledge incorporated in hybridization were the action points, and then a still growing up area of classifier systems known as combined classifiers was considered. This book comprises the aforementioned state-of-the-art topics and the latest research results of the author and his team from Department of Systems and Computer Networks, Wroclaw University of Technology, including as classifier based on feature space splitting, one-class classification, imbalance data, and data stream classification.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to cooperative game theory and a practice-oriented reference guide to new models and tools for studying bilateral fuzzy relations among several agents or players. It introduces the reader to several fuzzy models, each of which is first analyzed in the context of classical games (crisp games) and subsequently in the context of fuzzy games. Special emphasis is given to the value of Shapley, which is presented for the first time in the context of fuzzy games. Students and researchers will find here a self-contained reference guide to cooperative fuzzy games, characterized by a wealth of examples, descriptions of a wide range of possible situations, step-by-step explanations of the basic mathematical concepts involved, and easy-to-follow information on axioms and properties.

Taking inspiration from self-awareness in humans, this book introduces the new notion of computational self-awareness as a fundamental concept for designing and operating computing systems. The basic ability of such self-aware computing systems is to collect information about their state and progress, learning and maintaining models containing knowledge that enables them to reason about their behaviour. Self-aware computing systems will have the ability to utilise this knowledge to effectively and autonomously adapt and explain their behaviour, in changing conditions. This book addresses these fundamental concepts from an engineering perspective, aiming at developing primitives for building systems and applications. It will be of value to researchers, professionals and graduate students in computer science and engineering.

This book mainly focuses on cloud security and high performance computing for cloud auditing. The book discusses emerging challenges and techniques developed for high performance semantic cloud auditing, and presents the state of the art in cloud auditing, computing and security techniques with focus on technical aspects and feasibility of auditing issues in federated cloud computing environments. In summer 2011, the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) CyberBAT Cloud Security and Auditing Team initiated the exploration of the cloud security challenges and future cloud auditing research directions that are covered in this book. This work was supported by the United States government funds from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the AFOSR Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (SFFP), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Visiting Faculty Research Program (VFRP), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). All chapters were partially supported by the AFOSR Information Operations and Security Program extramural and intramural funds (AFOSR/RSL Program Manager: Dr. Robert Herklotz). Key Features: * Contains surveys of cyber threats and security issues in cloud computing and presents secure cloud architectures * Presents in-depth cloud auditing techniques, federated cloud security architectures, cloud access control models, and access assured information sharing technologies * Outlines a wide range of challenges and provides solutions to manage and control very large and complex data sets

The Soft Computing techniques, which are based on the information processing of biological systems are now massively used in the area of pattern recognition, making prediction & planning, as well as acting on the environment. Ideally speaking, soft computing is not a subject of homogeneous concepts and techniques; rather, it is an amalgamation of distinct methods that confirms to its guiding principle. At present, the main aim of soft computing is to exploit the tolerance for imprecision and uncertainty to achieve tractability, robustness and low solutions cost. The principal constituents of soft computing techniques are probabilistic reasoning, fuzzy logic, neuro-computing, genetic algorithms, belief networks, chaotic systems, as well as learning theory. This book covers contributions from various authors to demonstrate the use of soft computing techniques in various applications of engineering.

This book provides cutting-edge insights into autonomous vehicles and road terrain classification, and introduces a more rational and practical method for identifying road terrain. It presents the MRF algorithm, which combines the various sensors' classification results to improve the forward LRF for predicting upcoming road terrain types. The comparison between the predicting LRF and its corresponding MRF show that the MRF multiple-sensor fusion method is extremely robust and effective in terms of classifying road terrain. The book also demonstrates numerous applications of road terrain classification for various environments and types of autonomous vehicle, and includes abundant illustrations and models to make the comparison tables and figures more accessible.

Organizational Efficiency through Intelligent Information Technologies explores various aspects of design and development of intelligent technologies by bringing together the latest in research in the fields of information systems, intelligent agents, collaborative works, and much more. This reference source also highlights insights on agent-based problem solving as well as economic issues and organizational impact.

The book focuses on machine learning. Divided into three parts, the first part discusses the feature selection problem. The second part then describes the application of machine learning in the classification problem, while the third part presents an overview of real-world applications of swarm-based optimization algorithms. The concept of machine learning (ML) is not new in the field of computing. However, due to the ever-changing nature of requirements in today's world it has emerged in the form of completely new avatars. Now everyone is talking about ML-based solution strategies for a given problem set. The book includes research articles and expository papers on the theory and algorithms of machine learning and bio-inspiring optimization, as well as papers on numerical experiments and real-world applications.

This book examines the present and future of soft computer techniques. It explains how to use the latest technological tools, such as multicore processors and graphics processing units, to implement highly efficient intelligent system methods using a general purpose computer.

This book provides stepwise discussion, exhaustive literature review, detailed analysis and discussion, rigorous experimentation results (using several analytics tools), and an application-oriented approach that can be demonstrated with respect to data analytics using artificial intelligence to make systems stronger (i.e., impossible to breach). We can see many serious cyber breaches on Government databases or public profiles at online social networking in the recent decade. Today artificial intelligence or machine learning is redefining every aspect of cyber security. From improving organizations' ability to anticipate and thwart breaches, protecting the proliferating number of threat surfaces with Zero Trust Security frameworks to making passwords obsolete, AI and machine learning are essential to securing the perimeters of any business. The book is useful for researchers, academics, industry players, data engineers, data scientists, governmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations.

This book gathers cutting-edge papers in the area of Computational Intelligence, presented by specialists, and covering all major trends in the research community in order to provide readers with a rich primer. It presents an overview of various soft computing topics and approximate reasoning-based approaches, both from theoretical and applied perspectives. Numerous topics are covered: fundamentals aspects of fuzzy sets theory, reasoning approaches (interpolative, analogical, similarity-based), decision and optimization theory, fuzzy databases, soft machine learning, summarization, interpretability and XAI. Moreover, several application-based papers are included, e.g. on image processing, semantic web and intelligent tutoring systems. This book is dedicated to Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier in honor of her achievements in Computational Intelligence, which, throughout her career, have included profuse and diverse collaborations, both thematically and geographically.

This book consists of peer-reviewed papers presented at the First International Conference on Intelligent Computing in Control and Communication (ICCC 2020). It comprises interesting topics in the field of applications of control engineering, communication and computing technology. As the current world is witnessing the use of various intelligent techniques for their independent problem solving, so this book may have a wide importance for all range of researchers and scholars. The book serves as a reference for researchers, professionals and students from across electrical, electronic and computer engineering disciplines.

This book features selected papers presented at The International Science and Technology Conference "FarEastCon", which took place on October 2-4, 2018 in Vladivostok, Russian Federation. The conference represents an informational platform for accumulating expert opinion on projects and initiatives aimed at the implementation of farsighted scientific research and development; it also allows scientific and practical achievements to be shared with a wide circle of researchers. Sections of the conference are of interest for the broad range of experts involved in developing innovative solutions and organizing events that increase the efficiency of economic and innovative activities.

This edited book presents scientific results of 15th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD 2014) held on June 30 - July 2, 2014 in Las Vegas Nevada, USA. The aim of this conference was to bring together scientists, engineers, computer users, and students to share their experiences and exchange new ideas, research results about all aspects (theory, applications and tools) of computer and information science, and to discuss the practical challenges encountered along the way and the solutions adopted to solve them. The conference organizers selected the 13 outstanding papers from those papers accepted for presentation at the conference.

"Progress in Expressive Image Synthesis" (MEIS2015), was held in Fukuoka, Japan, September 25-27, 2015. The aim of the symposium was to provide a unique venue where various issues in computer graphics (CG) application fields could be discussed by mathematicians, CG researchers, and practitioners. Through the previous symposiums MEIS2013 and MEIS2014, mathematicians as well as CG researchers have recognized that CG is a specific and practical activity derived from mathematical theories. Issues found in CG broaden the field of mathematics and vice versa, and CG visualizes mathematical theories in an aesthetic manner. In this volume, the editors aim to provoke interdisciplinary research projects through the peer-reviewed papers and poster presentations at the this year's symposium. This book captures interactions among mathematicians, CG researchers, and practitioners sharing important, state-of-the-art issues in graphics and visual perception. The book is suitable for all CG researchers seeking open problem areas and especially for those entering the field who have not yet selected a research direction.

This textbook provides a step-by-step approach to numerical methods in engineering modelling. The authors provide a consistent treatment of the topic, from the ground up, to reinforce for students that numerical methods are a set of mathematical modelling tools which allow engineers to represent real-world systems and compute features of these systems with a predictable error rate. Each method presented addresses a specific type of problem, namely root-finding, optimization, integral, derivative, initial value problem, or boundary value problem, and each one encompasses a set of algorithms to solve the problem given some information and to a known error bound. The authors demonstrate that after developing a proper model and understanding of the engineering situation they are working on, engineers can break down a model into a set of specific mathematical problems, and then implement the appropriate numerical methods to solve these problems.

Humanoid robotics have made remarkable progress since the dawn of robotics. So why don't we have humanoid robot assistants in day-to-day life yet? This book analyzes the keys to building a successful humanoid robot for field robotics, where collisions become an unavoidable part of the game. The

author argues that the design goal should be real anthropomorphism, as opposed to mere human-like appearance. He deduces three major characteristics to aim for when designing a humanoid robot, particularly robot hands:

_ Robustness against impacts

_ Fast dynamics

_ Human-like grasping and manipulation performance

Instead of blindly copying human anatomy, this book opts for a holistic design me-tho-do-lo-gy. It analyzes human hands and existing robot hands to elucidate the important functionalities that are the building blocks toward these necessary characteristics.They are the keys to designing an anthropomorphic robot hand, as illustrated in the high performance anthropomorphic Awiwi Hand presented in this book.

This is not only a handbook for robot hand designers. It gives a comprehensive survey and analysis of the state of the art in robot hands as well as the human anatomy. It is also aimed at researchers and roboticists interested in the underlying functionalities of hands, grasping and manipulation.

The methodology of functional abstraction is not limited to robot hands, it can also help realize a new generation of humanoid robots to accommodate a broader spectrum of the needs of human society."

This book examines the methodological foundations of the Big Data-driven world, formulates its concept within the frameworks of modern control methods and theories, and approaches the peculiarities of Control Technologies as a specific sphere of the Big Data-driven world, distinguished in the modern Digital Economy. The book studies the genesis of mathematical and information methods' transition from data analysis & processing to knowledge discovery and predictive analytics in the 21st century. In addition, it analyzes the conditions of development and implementation of Big Data analysis approaches in investigative activities and determines the role and meaning of global networks as platforms for the establishment of legislation and regulations in the Big Data-driven world. The book examines that world through the prism of Legislation Issues, substantiate the scientific and methodological approaches to studying modern mechanisms of terrorism and extremism counteraction in the conditions of new challenges of dissemination and accessibility of socially dangerous information. Systematization of successful experience of the Big Data solutions implementation in the different countries and analyze causal connections of the Digital Economy formation from the positions of new technological challenges is performed. The book's target audience includes scientists, students, PhD and Master students who conduct scientific research on the topic of Big Data not only in the field of IT& data science, but also in connection with legislative regulation aspects of the modern information society. It also includes practitioners and experts, as well as state authorities and representatives of international organizations interested in creating mechanisms for implementing Digital Economy projects in the Big Data-driven world.

This illuminating collection offers a fresh look at the very latest advances in the field of embedded computer vision. Emerging areas covered by this comprehensive text/reference include the embedded realization of 3D vision technologies for a variety of applications, such as stereo cameras on mobile devices. Recent trends towards the development of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with embedded image and video processing algorithms are also examined. Topics and features: discusses in detail three major success stories - the development of the optical mouse, vision for consumer robotics, and vision for automotive safety; reviews state-of-the-art research on embedded 3D vision, UAVs, automotive vision, mobile vision apps, and augmented reality; examines the potential of embedded computer vision in such cutting-edge areas as the Internet of Things, the mining of large data streams, and in computational sensing; describes historical successes, current implementations, and future challenges.