This book is devoted to embedded systems (ESs), which can now be found in practically all fields of human activity. Embedded systems are essentially a special class of computing systems designed for monitoring and controlling objects of the physical world. The book begins by discussing the distinctive features of ESs, above all their cybernetic-physical character, and how they can be designed to deliver the required performance with a minimum amount of hardware. In turn, it presents a range of design methodologies. Considerable attention is paid to the hardware implementation of computational algorithms. It is shown that different parts of complex ESs could be implemented using models of finite state machines (FSMs). Also, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are very often used to implement different hardware accelerators in ESs. The book pays considerable attention to design methods for FPGA-based FSMs, before the closing section turns to programmable logic controllers widely used in industry. This book will be interesting and useful for students and postgraduates in the area of Computer Science, as well as for designers of embedded systems. In addition, it offers a good point of departure for creating embedded systems for various spheres of human activity.

Decades of scientific research on neurophysiology have proven emotions are not simply a minor aspect of human activity, but rather a fundamental one. The Handbook of Research on Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics: New Applications in Affective Computing and Artificial Intelligence focuses on the integration of emotions into artificial environments such as computers and robotics. Written by an international collaboration of experts within the field, this Handbook of Research covers topics such as emotion simulation and emotion synthetic development.

Increasingly powerful and diverse computing technologies have the potential to tackle ever greater and more complex problems and dilemmas in engineering and science disciplines. Principal Concepts in Applied Evolutionary Computation: Emerging Trends provides an introduction to the important interdisciplinary discipline of evolutionary computation, an artificial intelligence field that combines the principles of computational intelligence with the mechanisms of the theory of evolution. Academics and practicing field professionals will find this reference useful as they break into the emerging and complex world of evolutionary computation, learning to harness and utilize this exciting new interdisciplinary field.

The "2019 DigitalFUTURES - The 1st International Conference on Computational Design and Robotic Fabrication (CDRF 2019)" provides an international platform for advanced scientific research papers on the digital technology of architectural design and construction. The themes of the papers include, but are not limited to, architectural theories, tools, methods and procedures in material intelligence, data intelligence; computational intelligence, and robotic intelligence.

This volume contains revised and extended research articles written by prominent researchers who participated in the international conference on Advances in Engineering Technologies, which was held in Hong Kong, 12-14 March, 2014. Topics covered include engineering physics, engineering mathematics, scientific computing, control theory, artificial intelligence, electrical engineering, communications systems, and industrial applications. The book offers the state of art of tremendous advances in engineering technologies and physical science and applications, and also serves as an excellent reference work for researchers and graduate students working with/on engineering technologies and physical science and applications.

This book introduces a new paradigm called 'Optimization in Changeable Spaces' (OCS) as a useful tool for decision making and problem solving. It illustrates how OCS incorporates, searches, and constructively restructures the parameters, tangible and intangible, involved in the process of decision making. The book elaborates on OCS problems that can be modeled and solved effectively by using the concepts of competence set analysis, Habitual Domain (HD) and the mental operators called the 7-8-9 principles of deep knowledge of HD. In addition, new concepts of covering and discovering processes are proposed and formulated as mathematical tools to solve OCS problems. The book also includes reformulations of a number of illustrative real-life challenging problems that cannot be solved by traditional optimization techniques into OCS problems, and details how they can be addressed. Beyond that, it also includes perspectives related to innovation dynamics, management, artificial intelligence, artificial and e-economics, scientific discovery and knowledge extraction. This book will be of interest to managers of businesses and institutions, policy makers, and educators and students of decision making and behavior in DBA and/or MBA.

As a movement, transhumanism aims to upgrade the human body through science, constantly pushing back the limits of a person by using cutting-edge technologies to fix the human body and upgrade it beyond its natural abilities. Transhumanism can not only change human habits, but it can also change learning practices. By improving human learning, it improves the human organism beyond natural and biological limits. The Handbook of Research on Learning in the Age of Transhumanism is an essential research publication that discusses global values, norms, and ethics that relate to the diverse needs of learners in the digital world and addresses future priorities and needs for transhumanism. The book will identify and scrutinize the needs of learners in the age of transhumanism and examine best practices for transhumanist leaders in learning. Featuring topics such as cybernetics, pedagogy, and sociology, this book is ideal for educators, trainers, instructional designers, curriculum developers, professionals, researchers, academicians, policymakers, and librarians.

Business intelligence applications are of vital importance as they help organizations manage, develop, and communicate intangible assets such as information and knowledge. Organizations that have undertaken business intelligence initiatives have benefited from increases in revenue, as well as significant cost savings. Business Intelligence and Agile Methodologies for Knowledge-Based Organizations: Cross-Disciplinary Applications highlights the marriage between business intelligence and knowledge management through the use of agile methodologies. Through its fifteen chapters, this book offers perspectives on the integration between process modeling, agile methodologies, business intelligence, knowledge management, and strategic management.

With recent progress in information generation, users are experiencing increasing difficulties in processing the available amounts of high-dimensional data, extracting information from it, and eventually finding a meaning in the structured data. Computational Modeling and Simulation of Intellect: Current State and Future Perspectives confronts the problem of meaning by fusing together methods specific to different fields and exploring the computational efficiency and scalability of these methods. Researchers, instructors, designers of information and management systems, users of these systems, and graduate students will acquire the fundamental knowledge needed to be at the forefront of the research and to use it in the applications. The topic is of great importance for information and management science and technology, both currently and in future.

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 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 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 research monograph focuses on the design of arithmetic circuits in Quantum Dot Cellular Automata (QCA). Using the fact that the 3-input majority gate is a primitive in QCA, the book sets out to discover hitherto unknown properties of majority logic in the context of arithmetic circuit designs. The pursuit for efficient adders in QCA takes two forms. One involves application of the new results in majority logic to existing adders. The second involves development of a custom adder for QCA technology. A QCA adder named as hybrid adder is proposed and it is shown that it outperforms existing multi-bit adders with respect to area and delay. The work is extended to the design of a low-complexity multiplier for signed numbers in QCA. Furthermore the book explores two aspects unique to QCA technology, namely thermal robustness and the role of interconnects. In addition, the book introduces the reader to QCA layout design and simulation using QCADesigner. Features & Benefits: This research-based book: *Introduces the reader to Quantum Dot Cellular Automata, an emerging nanotechnology. *Explores properties of majority logic. *Demonstrates application of the properties to design efficient arithmetic circuits. *Guides the reader towards layout design and simulation in QCADesigner.

This book offers an introduction to modern natural language processing using machine learning, focusing on how neural networks create a machine interpretable representation of the meaning of natural language. Language is crucially linked to ideas - as Webster's 1923 "English Composition and Literature" puts it: "A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought". Thus the representation of sentences and the words that make them up is vital in advancing artificial intelligence and other "smart" systems currently being developed. Providing an overview of the research in the area, from Bengio et al.'s seminal work on a "Neural Probabilistic Language Model" in 2003, to the latest techniques, this book enables readers to gain an understanding of how the techniques are related and what is best for their purposes. As well as a introduction to neural networks in general and recurrent neural networks in particular, this book details the methods used for representing words, senses of words, and larger structures such as sentences or documents. The book highlights practical implementations and discusses many aspects that are often overlooked or misunderstood. The book includes thorough instruction on challenging areas such as hierarchical softmax and negative sampling, to ensure the reader fully and easily understands the details of how the algorithms function. Combining practical aspects with a more traditional review of the literature, it is directly applicable to a broad readership. It is an invaluable introduction for early graduate students working in natural language processing; a trustworthy guide for industry developers wishing to make use of recent innovations; and a sturdy bridge for researchers already familiar with linguistics or machine learning wishing to understand the other.

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.

Visual content understanding is a complex and important challenge for applications in automatic multimedia information indexing, medicine, robotics, and surveillance. Yet the performance of such systems can be improved by the fusion of individual modalities/techniques for content representation and machine learning.

This comprehensive text/reference presents a thorough overview of "Fusion in Computer Vision," from an interdisciplinary and multi-application viewpoint. Presenting contributions from an international selection of experts, the work describes numerous successful approaches, evaluated in the context of international benchmarks that model realistic use cases at significant scales.

Topics and features: examines late fusion approaches for concept recognition in images and videos, including the bag-of-words model; describes the interpretation of visual content by incorporating models of the human visual system with content understanding methods; investigates the fusion of multi-modal features of different semantic levels, as well as results of semantic concept detections, for example-based event recognition in video; proposes rotation-based ensemble classifiers for high-dimensional data, which encourage both individual accuracy and diversity within the ensemble; reviews application-focused strategies of fusion in video surveillance, biomedical information retrieval, and content detection in movies; discusses the modeling of mechanisms of human interpretation of complex visual content.

This authoritative collection is essential reading for researchers and students interested in the domain of information fusion for complex visual content understanding, and related fields.

This book introduces a new set of orthogonal hybrid functions (HF) which approximates time functions in a piecewise linear manner which is very suitable for practical applications. The book presents an analysis of different systems namely, time-invariant system, time-varying system, multi-delay systems---both homogeneous and non-homogeneous type- and the solutions are obtained in the form of discrete samples. The book also investigates system identification problems for many of the above systems. The book is spread over 15 chapters and contains 180 black and white figures, 18 colour figures, 85 tables and 56 illustrative examples. MATLAB codes for many such examples are included at the end of the book.

The book presents the challenges inherent in the paradigm shift of network systems from static to highly dynamic distributed systems - it proposes solutions that the symbiotic nature of biological systems can provide into altering networking systems to adapt to these changes. The author discuss how biological systems - which have the inherent capabilities of evolving, self-organizing, self-repairing and flourishing with time - are inspiring researchers to take opportunities from the biology domain and map them with the problems faced in network domain. The book revolves around the central idea of bio-inspired systems -- it begins by exploring why biology and computer network research are such a natural match. This is followed by presenting a broad overview of biologically inspired research in network systems -- it is classified by the biological field that inspired each topic and by the area of networking in which that topic lies. Each case elucidates how biological concepts have been most successfully applied in various domains. Nevertheless, it also presents a case study discussing the security aspects of wireless sensor networks and how biological solution stand out in comparison to optimized solutions. Furthermore, it also discusses novel biological solutions for solving problems in diverse engineering domains such as mechanical, electrical, civil, aerospace, energy and agriculture. The readers will not only get proper understanding of the bio inspired systems but also better insight for developing novel bio inspired solutions.

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.

This thesis provides a systematic and integral answer to an open problem concerning the universality of dynamic fuzzy controllers. It presents a number of novel ideas and approaches to various issues including universal function approximation, universal fuzzy models, universal fuzzy stabilization controllers, and universal fuzzy integral sliding mode controllers. The proposed control design criteria can be conveniently verified using the MATLAB toolbox. Moreover, the thesis provides a new, easy-to-use form of fuzzy variable structure control. Emphasis is given to the point that, in the context of deterministic/stochastic systems in general, the authors are in fact discussing non-affine nonlinear systems using a class of generalized T-S fuzzy models, which offer considerable potential in a wide range of applications.

This book presents a comprehensive study of different tools and techniques available to perform network forensics. Also, various aspects of network forensics are reviewed as well as related technologies and their limitations. This helps security practitioners and researchers in better understanding of the problem, current solution space, and future research scope to detect and investigate various network intrusions against such attacks efficiently. Forensic computing is rapidly gaining importance since the amount of crime involving digital systems is steadily increasing. Furthermore, the area is still underdeveloped and poses many technical and legal challenges. The rapid development of the Internet over the past decade appeared to have facilitated an increase in the incidents of online attacks. There are many reasons which are motivating the attackers to be fearless in carrying out the attacks. For example, the speed with which an attack can be carried out, the anonymity provided by the medium, nature of medium where digital information is stolen without actually removing it, increased availability of potential victims and the global impact of the attacks are some of the aspects. Forensic analysis is performed at two different levels: Computer Forensics and Network Forensics. Computer forensics deals with the collection and analysis of data from computer systems, networks, communication streams and storage media in a manner admissible in a court of law. Network forensics deals with the capture, recording or analysis of network events in order to discover evidential information about the source of security attacks in a court of law. Network forensics is not another term for network security. It is an extended phase of network security as the data for forensic analysis are collected from security products like firewalls and intrusion detection systems. The results of this data analysis are utilized for investigating the attacks. Network forensics generally refers to the collection and analysis of network data such as network traffic, firewall logs, IDS logs, etc. Technically, it is a member of the already-existing and expanding the field of digital forensics. Analogously, network forensics is defined as "The use of scientifically proved techniques to collect, fuses, identifies, examine, correlate, analyze, and document digital evidence from multiple, actively processing and transmitting digital sources for the purpose of uncovering facts related to the planned intent, or measured success of unauthorized activities meant to disrupt, corrupt, and or compromise system components as well as providing information to assist in response to or recovery from these activities." Network forensics plays a significant role in the security of today's organizations. On the one hand, it helps to learn the details of external attacks ensuring similar future attacks are thwarted. Additionally, network forensics is essential for investigating insiders' abuses that constitute the second costliest type of attack within organizations. Finally, law enforcement requires network forensics for crimes in which a computer or digital system is either being the target of a crime or being used as a tool in carrying a crime. Network security protects the system against attack while network forensics focuses on recording evidence of the attack. Network security products are generalized and look for possible harmful behaviors. This monitoring is a continuous process and is performed all through the day. However, network forensics involves post mortem investigation of the attack and is initiated after crime notification. There are many tools which assist in capturing data transferred over the networks so that an attack or the malicious intent of the intrusions may be investigated. Similarly, various network forensic frameworks are proposed in the literature.

This book introduces the latest research findings in cloud, edge, fog, and mist computing and their applications in various fields using geospatial data. It solves a number of problems of cloud computing and big data, such as scheduling, security issues using different techniques, which researchers from industry and academia have been attempting to solve in virtual environments. Some of these problems are of an intractable nature and so efficient technologies like fog, edge and mist computing play an important role in addressing these issues. By exploring emerging advances in cloud computing and big data analytics and their engineering applications, the book enables researchers to understand the mechanisms needed to implement cloud, edge, fog, and mist computing in their own endeavours, and motivates them to examine their own research findings and developments.

The goal of this book is to provide, in a friendly and refreshing manner, both theoretical concepts and practical techniques for the important and exciting field of Artificial Intelligence that can be directly applied to real-world healthcare problems. Healthcare - the final frontier. Lately, it seems like Pandora opened the box and evil was released into the world. Fortunately, there was one thing left in the box: hope. In recent decades, hope has been increasingly represented by Intelligent Decision Support Systems. Their continuing mission: to explore strange new diseases, to seek out new treatments and drugs, and to intelligently manage healthcare resources and patients. Hence, this book is designed for all those who wish to learn how to explore, analyze and find new solutions for the most challenging domain of all time: healthcare.