This book contains an edited selection of the papers accepted for presentation and discussion at the first International Symposium on Qualitative Research (ISQR2016), held in Porto, Portugal, July 12th-14th, 2016. The book and the symposium features the four main application fields Education, Health, Social Sciences and Engineering and Technology and seven main subjects: Rationale and Paradigms of Qualitative Research (theoretical studies, critical reflection about epistemological dimensions, ontological and axiological); Systematization of approaches with Qualitative Studies (literature review, integrating results, aggregation studies, meta -analysis, meta- analysis of qualitative meta- synthesis, meta- ethnography); Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research (emphasis in research processes that build on mixed methodologies but with priority to qualitative approaches); Data Analysis Types (content analysis , discourse analysis , thematic analysis , narrative analysis , etc.); Innovative processes of Qualitative Data Analysis (design analysis, articulation and triangulation of different sources of data - images, audio, video); Qualitative Research in Web Context (eResearch, virtual ethnography, interaction analysis , latent corpus on the internet, etc.); Qualitative Analysis with Support of Specific Software (usability studies, user experience, the impact of software on the quality of research.

This volume comprises a selection of works presented at the Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO 2016) workshop held in September 2016 in Tlalnepantla, Mexico. The development of powerful search and optimization techniques is of great importance in today's world and requires researchers and practitioners to tackle a growing number of challenging real-world problems. In particular, there are two well-established and widely known fields that are commonly applied in this area: (i) traditional numerical optimization techniques and (ii) comparatively recent bio-inspired heuristics. Both paradigms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to solve some challenging problems while still failing in others. The goal of the NEO workshop series is to bring together experts from these and related fields to discuss, compare and merge their complementary perspectives in order to develop fast and reliable hybrid methods that maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the underlying paradigms. In doing so, NEO promotes the development of new techniques that are applicable to a broader class of problems. Moreover, NEO fosters the understanding and adequate treatment of real-world problems particularly in emerging fields that affect all of us, such as healthcare, smart cities, big data, among many others. The extended papers presented in the book contribute to achieving this goal.

This book is concerned with recent advances in fitness landscapes. The concept of fitness landscapes originates from theoretical biology and refers to a framework for analysing and visualizing the relationships between genotypes, phenotypes and fitness. These relationships lay at the centre of attempts to mathematically describe evolutionary processes and evolutionary dynamics.

The book addresses recent advances in the understanding of fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology and evolutionary computation. In the volume, experts in the field of fitness landscapes present these findings in an integrated way to make it accessible to a number of audiences: senior undergraduate and graduate students in computer science, theoretical biology, physics, applied mathematics and engineering, but also researcher looking for a reference or/and entry point into using fitness landscapes for analysing algorithms. Also practitioners wanting to employ fitness landscape techniques for evaluating bio- and nature-inspired computing algorithms can find valuable material in the book. For teaching proposes, the book could also be used as a reference handbook.

This book presents a study in knowledge discovery in data with knowledge understood as a set of relations among objects and their properties. Relations in this case are implicative decision rules and the paradigm in which they are induced is that of computing with granules defined by rough inclusions, the latter introduced and studied within rough mereology, the fuzzified version of mereology. In this book basic classes of rough inclusions are defined and based on them methods for inducing granular structures from data are highlighted. The resulting granular structures are subjected to classifying algorithms, notably k-nearest neighbors and bayesian classifiers. Experimental results are given in detail both in tabular and visualized form for fourteen data sets from UCI data repository. A striking feature of granular classifiers obtained by this approach is that preserving the accuracy of them on original data, they reduce substantially the size of the granulated data set as well as the set of granular decision rules. This feature makes the presented approach attractive in cases where a small number of rules providing a high classification accuracy is desirable. As basic algorithms used throughout the text are explained and illustrated with hand examples, the book may also serve as a textbook.

The book presents a snapshot of the state of the art in the field of fully fuzzy linear programming. The main focus is on showing current methods for finding the fuzzy optimal solution of fully fuzzy linear programming problems in which all the parameters and decision variables are represented by non-negative fuzzy numbers. It presents new methods developed by the authors, as well as existing methods developed by others, and their application to real-world problems, including fuzzy transportation problems. Moreover, it compares the outcomes of the different methods and discusses their advantages/disadvantages. As the first work to collect at one place the most important methods for solving fuzzy linear programming problems, the book represents a useful reference guide for students and researchers, providing them with the necessary theoretical and practical knowledge to deal with linear programming problems under uncertainty.

This book introduces the optical multi-band polarization imaging theory and the utilization of the multi-band polarimetric information for detecting the camouflage object and the optical hidden marker, and enhancing the visibility in bad weather and water. The book describes systematically and in detail the basic optical polarimetry theory; provides abundant multi-band polarimetric imaging experiment data; and indicates practical evaluation methods for designing the multi-band polarization imager, for analyzing and modeling the object's multi-band polarization characteristics, and for enhancing the vision performance in scattering media. This book shows the latest research results of multi-band polarimetric vision, especially in camouflage object detection, optical hidden marker detection and multi-band polarimetric imagery fusion. From this book, readers can get a complete understanding about multi-band polarimetric imaging and its application in different vision tasks.

Closed Circuit TeleVision (CCTV) cameras have been increasingly deployed pervasively in public spaces including retail centres and shopping malls. Intelligent video analytics aims to automatically analyze content of massive amount of public space video data and has been one of the most active areas of computer vision research in the last two decades. Current focus of video analytics research has been largely on detecting alarm events and abnormal behaviours for public safety and security applications. However, increasingly CCTV installations have also been exploited for gathering and analyzing business intelligence information, in order to enhance marketing and operational efficiency. For example, in retail environments, surveillance cameras can be utilised to collect statistical information about shopping behaviour and preference for marketing (e.g., how many people entered a shop; how many females/males or which age groups of people showed interests to a particular product; how long did they stay in the shop; and what are the frequent paths), and to measure operational efficiency for improving customer experience. Video analytics has the enormous potential for non-security oriented commercial applications. This book presents the latest developments on video analytics for business intelligence applications. It provides both academic and commercial practitioners an understanding of the state-of-the-art and a resource for potential applications and successful practice.

The book consists of 19 extended and revised chapters based on original works presented during a poster session organized within the 5th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence that was held between 11 and 13 of September 2013 in Craiova, Romania. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is titled "Agents and Multi-Agent Systems" and consists of 8 chapters that concentrate on many problems related to agent and multi-agent systems, including: formal models, agent autonomy, emergent properties, agent programming, agent-based simulation and planning. The second part of the book is titled "Intelligent Computational Methods" and consists of 6 chapters. The authors present applications of various intelligent computational methods like neural networks, mathematical optimization and multistage decision processes in areas like cooperation, character recognition, wireless networks, transport, and metal structures. The third part of the book is titled "Language and Knowledge Processing Systems," and consists of 5 papers devoted to processing methods for knowledge and language information in various applications, including: language identification, corpus comparison, opinion classification, group decision making, and rule bases.

Computational modeling and simulation has developed and expanded into a diverse range of fields such as digital signal processing, image processing, robotics, systems biology, and many more; enhancing the need for a diversifying problem solving applications in this area. Efficiency and Scalability Methods for Computational Intellect presents various theories and methods for approaching the problem of modeling and simulating intellect in order to target computation efficiency and scalability of proposed methods. Researchers, instructors, and graduate students will benefit from this current research and will in turn be able to apply the knowledge in an effective manner to gain an understanding of how to improve this field.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 10th IFIP WG 5.14 International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture, CCTA 2016, held in Dongying, China, in October 2016. The 55 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 128 submissions. They cover a wide range of interesting theories and applications of information technology in agriculture, including intelligent sensing, cloud computing, key technologies of the Internet of Things, precision agriculture, animal husbandry information technology, including Internet + modern animal husbandry, livestock big data platform and cloud computing applications, intelligent breeding equipment, precision production models, water product networking and big data , including fishery IoT, intelligent aquaculture facilities, and big data applications.

Written to bridge the information needs of management and computational scientists, this book presents the first comprehensive treatment of Computational Red Teaming (CRT). The author describes an analytics environment that blends human reasoning and computational modeling to design risk-aware and evidence-based smart decision making systems. He presents the Shadow CRT Machine, which shadows the operations of an actual system to think with decision makers, challenge threats, and design remedies. This is the first book to generalize red teaming (RT) outside the military and security domains and it offers coverage of RT principles, practical and ethical guidelines. The author utilizes Gilbert's principles for introducing a science. Simplicity: where the book follows a special style to make it accessible to a wide range of readers. Coherence: where only necessary elements from experimentation, optimization, simulation, data mining, big data, cognitive information processing, and system thinking are blended together systematically to present CRT as the science of Risk Analytics and Challenge Analytics. Utility: where the author draws on a wide range of examples, ranging from job interviews to Cyber operations, before presenting three case studies from air traffic control technologies, human behavior, and complex socio-technical systems involving real-time mining and integration of human brain data in the decision making environment.

The book presents a knowledge discovery based approach to build a recommender system supporting a physician in treating tinnitus patients with the highly successful method called Tinnitus Retraining Therapy. It describes experiments on extracting novel knowledge from the historical dataset of patients treated by Dr. P. Jastreboff so that to better understand factors behind therapy's effectiveness and better personalize treatments for different profiles of patients. The book is a response for a growing demand of an advanced data analytics in the healthcare industry in order to provide better care with the data driven decision-making solutions. The potential economic benefits of applying computerized clinical decision support systems include not only improved efficiency in health care delivery (by reducing costs, improving quality of care and patient safety), but also enhancement in treatment's standardization, objectivity and availability in places of scarce expert's knowledge on this difficult to treat hearing disorder. Furthermore, described approach could be used in assessment of the clinical effectiveness of evidence-based intervention of various proposed treatments for tinnitus.

Various fundamental applications in computer vision and machine learning require finding the basis of a certain subspace. Examples of such applications include face detection, motion estimation, and activity recognition. An increasing interest has been recently placed on this area as a result of significant advances in the mathematics of matrix rank optimization. Interestingly, robust subspace estimation can be posed as a low-rank optimization problem, which can be solved efficiently using techniques such as the method of Augmented Lagrange Multiplier. In this book, the authorsdiscuss fundamental formulations and extensions for low-rank optimization-based subspace estimation and representation. By minimizing the rank of the matrix containing observations drawn from images, the authors demonstrate how to solve four fundamental computer vision problems, including video denosing, background subtraction, motion estimation, and activity recognition."

Computational Intelligence techniques have been widely explored in various domains including forensics. Analysis in forensic encompasses the study of pattern analysis that answer the question of interest in security, medical, legal, genetic studies and etc. However, forensic analysis is usually performed through experiments in lab which is expensive both in cost and time. Therefore, this book seeks to explore the progress and advancement of computational intelligence technique in different focus areas of forensic studies. This aims to build stronger connection between computer scientists and forensic field experts.

This book, "Computational Intelligence in" "Digital Forensics: Forensic Investigation and Applications," is the first volume in the Intelligent Systems Reference Library series. The book presents original research results and innovative applications of computational intelligence in digital forensics. This edited volume contains seventeen chapters and presents the latest state-of-the-art advancement of Computational Intelligence in Digital Forensics; in both theoretical and application papers related to novel discovery in intelligent forensics. The chapters are further organized into three sections: (1) Introduction, (2) Forensic Discovery and Investigation, which discusses the computational intelligence technologies employed in Digital Forensic, and (3) Intelligent Forensic Science Applications, which encompasses the applications of computational intelligence in Digital Forensic, such as human anthropology, human biometrics, human by products, drugs, and electronic devices.

Vision-based control of wheeled mobile robots is an interesting field of research from a scientific and even social point of view due to its potential applicability. This book presents a formal treatment of some aspects of control theory applied to the problem of vision-based pose regulation of wheeled mobile robots. In this problem, the robot has to reach a desired position and orientation, which are specified by a target image. It is faced in such a way that vision and control are unified to achieve stability of the closed loop, a large region of convergence, without local minima and good robustness against parametric uncertainty. Three different control schemes that rely on monocular vision as unique sensor are presented and evaluated experimentally. A common benefit of these approaches is that they are valid for imaging systems obeying approximately a central projection model, e.g., conventional cameras, catadioptric systems and some fisheye cameras. Thus, the presented control schemes are generic approaches. A minimum set of visual measurements, integrated in adequate task functions, are taken from a geometric constraint imposed between corresponding image features. Particularly, the epipolar geometry and the trifocal tensor are exploited since they can be used for generic scenes. A detailed experimental evaluation is presented for each control scheme.

This paper collection is the second volume of the LNMOB series on Road Vehicle Automation. The book contains a comprehensive review of current technical, socio-economic, and legal perspectives written by experts coming from public authorities, companies and universities in the U.S., Europe and Japan. It originates from the Automated Vehicle Symposium 2014, which was jointly organized by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) in Burlingame, CA, in July 2014. The contributions discuss the challenges arising from the integration of highly automated and self-driving vehicles into the transportation system, with a focus on human factors and different deployment scenarios. This book is an indispensable source of information for academic researchers, industrial engineers, and policy makers interested in the topic of road vehicle automation.

This book presents works from world-class experts from academia, industry, and national agencies representing countries from across the world focused on automotive fields for in-vehicle signal processing and safety. These include cutting-edge studies on safety, driver behavior, infrastructure, and human-to-vehicle interfaces. Vehicle Systems, Driver Modeling and Safety is appropriate for researchers, engineers, and professionals working in signal processing for vehicle systems, next generation system design from driver-assisted through fully autonomous vehicles.

This book presents the latest findings in the field of brain-inspired intelligence and visual perception (BIVP), and discusses novel research assumptions, including an introduction to brain science and the brain vision hypotheses. Moreover, it introduces readers to the theory and algorithms of BIVP - such as pheromone accumulation and iteration, neural cognitive computing mechanisms, the integration and scheduling of core modules, and brain-inspired perception, motion and control - in a step-by-step manner. Accordingly, it will appeal to university researchers, R&D engineers, undergraduate and graduate students; to anyone interested in robots, brain cognition or computer vision; and to all those wishing to learn about the core theory, principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of BIVP.

This innovative reference examines how consumer health informatics (CHI) can transform healthcare systems stressed by staffing shortages and budget constraints and challenged by patients taking a more active role in their care. It situates CHI as vital to upgrading healthcare service delivery, detailing the relationship between health information technologies and quality healthcare, and outlining what stakeholders need to learn for health IT systems to function effectively. Wide-ranging content identifies critical issues and answers key questions at the consumer, practitioner, administration, and staff levels, using examples from diverse conditions, countries, technologies, and specialties. In this framework, the benefits of CHI are seen across service domains, from individual patients and consumers to healthcare systems and global health entities. Included in the coverage: Use of video technology in an aged care environment A context-aware remote health monitoring service for improved patient care Accessibility issues in interoperable sharing of electronic health records: physician's perspective Managing gestational diabetes with mobile web-based reporting of glucose readings An organizing vision perspective for developing and adopting e-health solutions An ontology of consumer health informatics Contemporary Consumer Health Informatics combines blueprint and idea book for public health and health informatics students, healthcare professionals, physicians, medical administrators, managers, and IT practitioners.

This book brings together a rich selection of studies in mathematical modeling and computational intelligence, with application in several fields of engineering, like automation, biomedical, chemical, civil, electrical, electronic, geophysical and mechanical engineering, on a multidisciplinary approach. Authors from five countries and 16 different research centers contribute with their expertise in both the fundamentals and real problems applications based upon their strong background on modeling and computational intelligence. The reader will find a wide variety of applications, mathematical and computational tools and original results, all presented with rigorous mathematical procedures. This work is intended for use in graduate courses of engineering, applied mathematics and applied computation where tools as mathematical and computational modeling, numerical methods and computational intelligence are applied to the solution of real problems.

This book presents an overview of a variety of contemporary statistical, mathematical and computer science techniques which are used to further the knowledge in the medical domain. The authors focus on applying data mining to the medical domain, including mining the sets of clinical data typically found in patient's medical records, image mining, medical mining, data mining and machine learning applied to generic genomic data and more. This work also introduces modeling behavior of cancer cells, multi-scale computational models and simulations of blood flow through vessels by using patient-specific models. The authors cover different imaging techniques used to generate patient-specific models. This is used in computational fluid dynamics software to analyze fluid flow. Case studies are provided at the end of each chapter. Professionals and researchers with quantitative backgrounds will find Computational Medicine in Data Mining and Modeling useful as a reference. Advanced-level students studying computer science, mathematics, statistics and biomedicine will also find this book valuable as a reference or secondary text book.

FSR, the International Conference on Field and Service Robotics, is the leading single track conference of robotics for field and service applications. This book presents the results of FSR2012, the eighth conference of Field and Service Robotics, which was originally planned for 2011 with the venue of Matsushima in Tohoku region of Japan. However, on March 11, 2011, a magnitude M9.0 earthquake occurred off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, and a large-scale disaster was caused by the Tsunami which resulted, therefore the conference was postponed by one year to July, 2012. In fact, this earthquake raised issues concerning the contribution of field and service robotics technology to emergency scenarios. A number of precious lessons were learned from operation of robots in the resulting, very real and challenging, disaster environments. Up-to-date study on disaster response, relief and recovery was then featured in the conference. This book offers 43 papers on a broad range of topics including: Disaster Response, Service/Entertainment Robots, Inspection/Maintenance Robots, Mobile Robot Navigation, Agricultural Robots, Robots for Excavation, Planetary Exploration, Large Area Mapping, SLAM for Outdoor Robots, and Elemental Technology for Mobile Robots.

This book demonstrates the power of neural networks in learning complex behavior from the underlying financial time series data. The results presented also show how neural networks can successfully be applied to volatility modeling, option pricing, and value-at-risk modeling. These features mean that they can be applied to market-risk problems to overcome classic problems associated with statistical models.

Thought, comprehension, and intelligence are everyday concepts that are so pervasive through the lives of every human being that people scarcely think about them at all. These processes are so complex under the surface, however, that a fully developed scientific discipline is necessary to explore these topics. Developments in Natural Intelligence Research and Knowledge Engineering: Advancing Applications covers the intricate worlds of thought, comprehension, intelligence, and knowledge through the scientific field of Cognitive Science. This groundbreaking reference contains research from global experts, covering topics that have been pivotal at major conferences covering Cognitive Science topics.