This book presents best selected papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Smart Computing and Informatics (SCI 2020), held at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Vasavi College of Engineering (Autonomous), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. It presents advanced and multi-disciplinary research towards the design of smart computing and informatics. The theme is on a broader front which focuses on various innovation paradigms in system knowledge, intelligence and sustainability that may be applied to provide realistic solutions to varied problems in society, environment and industries. The scope is also extended towards the deployment of emerging computational and knowledge transfer approaches, optimizing solutions in various disciplines of science, technology and health care.

This book chronicles a 10-year introduction of blended learning into the delivery at a leading technological university, with a longstanding tradition of technology-enabled teaching and learning, and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Hence, both teachers and students were familiar with the idea of online courses. Despite this, the longitudinal experiment did not proceed as expected. Though few technical problems, it required behavioural changes from teachers and learners, thus unearthing a host of socio-technical issues, challenges, and conundrums. With the undercurrent of design ideals such as "tech for good", any industrial sector must examine whether digital platforms are credible substitutes or at best complementary. In this era of Industry 4.0, higher education, like any other industry, should not be about the creative destruction of what we value in universities, but their digital transformation. The book concludes with an agenda for large, repeatable Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to validate digital platforms that could fulfil the aspirations of the key stakeholder groups - students, faculty, and regulators as well as delving into the role of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as surrogates for "fees-free" higher education and whether the design of such a HiEd 4.0 platform is even a credible proposition. Specifically, the book examines the data-driven evidence within a design-based research methodology to present outcomes of two alternative instructional designs evaluated - traditional lecturing and blended learning. Based on the research findings and statistical analysis, it concludes that the inexorable shift to online delivery of education must be guided by informed educational management and innovation.

Applying methodologies of Software Process Improvement (SPI) is an effective way for businesses to remain competitive in the software industry. However, many organizations find implementing software process initiatives challenging. Agile Estimation Techniques and Innovative Approaches to Software Process Improvement reviews current SPI techniques and applications through discussions on current and future trends as well as the presentation of case studies on SPI implementation. Ideal for use by academics, students, and policy-makers, as well as industry professionals and managers, this publication provides a complete overview of current tools and methodologies regarding Software Process Improvement.

This book reviews research developments in diverse areas of reinforcement learning such as model-free actor-critic methods, model-based learning and control, information geometry of policy searches, reward design, and exploration in biology and the behavioral sciences. Special emphasis is placed on advanced ideas, algorithms, methods, and applications. The contributed papers gathered here grew out of a lecture course on reinforcement learning held by Prof. Jan Peters in the winter semester 2018/2019 at Technische Universitat Darmstadt. The book is intended for reinforcement learning students and researchers with a firm grasp of linear algebra, statistics, and optimization. Nevertheless, all key concepts are introduced in each chapter, making the content self-contained and accessible to a broader audience.

Radical developments in financial management, spurred by improvements in computer technology, have created demand for people who can use modern financial techniques combined with computer skills such as C++. Dr. Brooks gives readers the ability to express derivative solutions in an attractive, user-friendly format, and the ability to develop a permanent software package containing them. His book explains in detail how to write C++ source code and at the same time explains derivative valuation problems and methods. Entry level as well as experienced financial professionals have already found that the ability to understand and write C++ code has greatly enhanced their careers. This is an important hands-on training resource for practitioners and a clearly presented textbook for graduate-level students in business and finance.

Dr. Brooks combines object-oriented C++ programming with modern derivatives technology and provides numerous examples to illustrate complex derivative applications. He covers C++ within the text and the Borland C++Builder program, on which the book is based, in extensive appendices. His book combines basic C++ coding with fundamental finance problems, illustrates traditional techniques for solving more complicated problems, and develops the reader's ability to express complex mathematical solutions in the object-oriented framework of C++. It also reviews derivative solutions techniques and illustrates them with C++ code, reviews general approaches to valuing interest rate contingent claims, and focuses on practical ways to implement them. The result is a book that trains readers simultaneously in the substance of its field, financial derivatives, and the programming of solutions to problems in it.

The five-volume set IFIP AICT 630, 631, 632, 633, and 634 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International IFIP WG 5.7 Conference on Advances in Production Management Systems, APMS 2021, held in Nantes, France, in September 2021.*The 378 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 529 submissions. They discuss artificial intelligence techniques, decision aid and new and renewed paradigms for sustainable and resilient production systems at four-wall factory and value chain levels. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Part I: artificial intelligence based optimization techniques for demand-driven manufacturing; hybrid approaches for production planning and scheduling; intelligent systems for manufacturing planning and control in the industry 4.0; learning and robust decision support systems for agile manufacturing environments; low-code and model-driven engineering for production system; meta-heuristics and optimization techniques for energy-oriented manufacturing systems; metaheuristics for production systems; modern analytics and new AI-based smart techniques for replenishment and production planning under uncertainty; system identification for manufacturing control applications; and the future of lean thinking and practice Part II: digital transformation of SME manufacturers: the crucial role of standard; digital transformations towards supply chain resiliency; engineering of smart-product-service-systems of the future; lean and Six Sigma in services healthcare; new trends and challenges in reconfigurable, flexible or agile production system; production management in food supply chains; and sustainability in production planning and lot-sizing Part III: autonomous robots in delivery logistics; digital transformation approaches in production management; finance-driven supply chain; gastronomic service system design; modern scheduling and applications in industry 4.0; recent advances in sustainable manufacturing; regular session: green production and circularity concepts; regular session: improvement models and methods for green and innovative systems; regular session: supply chain and routing management; regular session: robotics and human aspects; regular session: classification and data management methods; smart supply chain and production in society 5.0 era; and supply chain risk management under coronavirus Part IV: AI for resilience in global supply chain networks in the context of pandemic disruptions; blockchain in the operations and supply chain management; data-based services as key enablers for smart products, manufacturing and assembly; data-driven methods for supply chain optimization; digital twins based on systems engineering and semantic modeling; digital twins in companies first developments and future challenges; human-centered artificial intelligence in smart manufacturing for the operator 4.0; operations management in engineer-to-order manufacturing; product and asset life cycle management for smart and sustainable manufacturing systems; robotics technologies for control, smart manufacturing and logistics; serious games analytics: improving games and learning support; smart and sustainable production and supply chains; smart methods and techniques for sustainable supply chain management; the new digital lean manufacturing paradigm; and the role of emerging technologies in disaster relief operations: lessons from COVID-19 Part V: data-driven platforms and applications in production and logistics: digital twins and AI for sustainability; regular session: new approaches for routing problem solving; regular session: improvement of design and operation of manufacturing systems; regular session: crossdock and transportation issues; regular session: maintenance improvement and lifecycle management; regular session: additive manufacturing and mass customization; regular session: frameworks and conceptual modelling for systems and services efficiency; regular session: optimization of production and transportation systems; regular session: optimization of supply chain agility and reconfigurability; regular session: advanced modelling approaches; regular session: simulation and optimization of systems performances; regular session: AI-based approaches for quality and performance improvement of production systems; and regular session: risk and performance management of supply chains *The conference was held online.

This book presents high-quality research papers presented at the International Conference on Smart Computing and Cyber Security: Strategic Foresight, Security Challenges and Innovation (SMARTCYBER 2020) held during July 7-8, 2020, in the Department of Smart Computing, Kyungdong University, Global Campus, South Korea. The book includes selected works from academics and industrial experts in the field of computer science, information technology, and electronics and telecommunication. The content addresses challenges of cyber security.

RDF-based knowledge graphs require additional formalisms to be fully context-aware, which is presented in this book. This book also provides a collection of provenance techniques and state-of-the-art metadata-enhanced, provenance-aware, knowledge graph-based representations across multiple application domains, in order to demonstrate how to combine graph-based data models and provenance representations. This is important to make statements authoritative, verifiable, and reproducible, such as in biomedical, pharmaceutical, and cybersecurity applications, where the data source and generator can be just as important as the data itself. Capturing provenance is critical to ensure sound experimental results and rigorously designed research studies for patient and drug safety, pathology reports, and medical evidence generation. Similarly, provenance is needed for cyberthreat intelligence dashboards and attack maps that aggregate and/or fuse heterogeneous data from disparate data sources to differentiate between unimportant online events and dangerous cyberattacks, which is demonstrated in this book. Without provenance, data reliability and trustworthiness might be limited, causing data reuse, trust, reproducibility and accountability issues. This book primarily targets researchers who utilize knowledge graphs in their methods and approaches (this includes researchers from a variety of domains, such as cybersecurity, eHealth, data science, Semantic Web, etc.). This book collects core facts for the state of the art in provenance approaches and techniques, complemented by a critical review of existing approaches. New research directions are also provided that combine data science and knowledge graphs, for an increasingly important research topic.

Despite the advances that have been made in programming, there is still a lack of sufficient methods for quality control. While code standards try to force programmers to follow a specific set of rules, few tools exist that really deal with automatic refactoring of this code, and evaluation of the coverage of these tests is still a challenge. Code Generation, Analysis Tools, and Testing for Quality is an essential reference source that discusses the generation and writing of computer programming and methods of quality control such as analysis and testing. Featuring research on topics such as programming languages, quality assessment, and automated development, this book is ideally designed for academicians, practitioners, computer science teachers, enterprise developers, and researchers seeking coverage on code auditing strategies and methods.

This book aims to provide some insights into recently developed bio-inspired algorithms within recent emerging trends of fog computing, sentiment analysis, and data streaming as well as to provide a more comprehensive approach to the big data management from pre-processing to analytics to visualization phases. The subject area of this book is within the realm of computer science, notably algorithms (meta-heuristic and, more particularly, bio-inspired algorithms). Although application domains of these new algorithms may be mentioned, the scope of this book is not on the application of algorithms to specific or general domains but to provide an update on recent research trends for bio-inspired algorithms within a specific application domain or emerging area. These areas include data streaming, fog computing, and phases of big data management. One of the reasons for writing this book is that the bio-inspired approach does not receive much attention but shows considerable promise and diversity in terms of approach of many issues in big data and streaming. Some novel approaches of this book are the use of these algorithms to all phases of data management (not just a particular phase such as data mining or business intelligence as many books focus on); effective demonstration of the effectiveness of a selected algorithm within a chapter against comparative algorithms using the experimental method. Another novel approach is a brief overview and evaluation of traditional algorithms, both sequential and parallel, for use in data mining, in order to provide an overview of existing algorithms in use. This overview complements a further chapter on bio-inspired algorithms for data mining to enable readers to make a more suitable choice of algorithm for data mining within a particular context. In all chapters, references for further reading are provided, and in selected chapters, the author also include ideas for future research.

This book presents a summary of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in its first two chapters. The remaining chapters of the book provide everything one must know about the basic artificial intelligence to modern machine intelligence techniques including the hybrid computational intelligence technique, using the concepts of several real-life solved examples, design of projects and research ideas. The solved examples with more than 200 illustrations presented in the book are a great help to instructors, students, non-AI professionals, and researchers. Each example is discussed in detail with encoding, normalization, architecture, detailed design, process flow, and sample input/output. Summary of the fundamental concepts with solved examples is a unique combination and highlight of this book.

This open access book presents selected papers from International Symposium on Mathematics, Quantum Theory, and Cryptography (MQC), which was held on September 25-27, 2019 in Fukuoka, Japan. The international symposium MQC addresses the mathematics and quantum theory underlying secure modeling of the post quantum cryptography including e.g. mathematical study of the light-matter interaction models as well as quantum computing. The security of the most widely used RSA cryptosystem is based on the difficulty of factoring large integers. However, in 1994 Shor proposed a quantum polynomial time algorithm for factoring integers, and the RSA cryptosystem is no longer secure in the quantum computing model. This vulnerability has prompted research into post-quantum cryptography using alternative mathematical problems that are secure in the era of quantum computers. In this regard, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began to standardize post-quantum cryptography in 2016. This book is suitable for postgraduate students in mathematics and computer science, as well as for experts in industry working on post-quantum cryptography.

This book focuses on software sustainability, regarded in terms of how software is or can be developed while taking into consideration environmental, social, and economic dimensions. The sixteen chapters cover various related issues ranging from technical aspects like energy-efficient programming techniques, formal proposals related to energy efficiency measurement, patterns to build energy-efficient software, the role of developers on energy efficient software systems and tools for detecting and refactoring code smells/energy bugs; to human aspects like its impact on software sustainability or the adaptation of ACM/IEEE guidelines for student and professional education and; and an economics-driven architectural evaluation for sustainability. Also aspects as the elements of governance and management that organizations should consider when implementing, assessing and improving Green IT or the relationship between software sustainability and the Corporate Social Responsibility of software companies are included. The chapters are complemented by usage scenarios and experience reports on several domains as cloud applications, agile development or e-Health, among others. As a whole, the chapters provide a complete overview of the various issues related to sustainable software development. The target readership for this book includes CxOs, (e.g. Chief Information Officers, Chief Executive Officers, Chief Technology Officers, etc.) software developers, software managers, auditors, business owners, and quality professionals. It is also intended for students of software engineering and information systems, and software researchers who want to know the state of the art regarding software sustainability.

This book highlights essential concepts in connection with the traditional bat algorithm and its recent variants, as well as its application to find optimal solutions for a variety of real-world engineering and medical problems. Today, swarm intelligence-based meta-heuristic algorithms are extensively being used to address a wide range of real-world optimization problems due to their adaptability and robustness. Developed in 2009, the bat algorithm (BA) is one of the most successful swarm intelligence procedures, and has been used to tackle optimization tasks for more than a decade. The BA's mathematical model is quite straightforward and easy to understand and enhance, compared to other swarm approaches. Hence, it has attracted the attention of researchers who are working to find optimal solutions in a diverse range of domains, such as N-dimensional numerical optimization, constrained/unconstrained optimization and linear/nonlinear optimization problems. Along with the traditional BA, its enhanced versions are now also being used to solve optimization problems in science, engineering and medical applications around the globe.