In education today, technology alone doesn't always lead to immediate success for students or institutions. In order to gauge the efficacy of educational technology, we need ways to measure the efficacy of educational practices in their own right. Through a better understanding of how learning takes place, we may work toward establishing best practices for students, educators, and institutions. These goals can be accomplished with learning analytics.

"Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice "updates this emerging field with the latest in theories, findings, strategies, and tools from across education and technological disciplines. Guiding readers through preparation, design, and examples of implementation, this pioneering reference clarifies LA methods as not mere data collection but sophisticated, systems-based analysis with practical applicability inside the classroom and in the larger world.

Case studies illustrate applications of LA throughout academic settings (e.g., intervention, advisement, technology design), and their resulting impact on pedagogy and learning. The goal is to bring greater efficiency and deeper engagement to individual students, learning communities, and educators, as chapters show diverse uses of learning analytics to:

Enhance student and faculty performance.Improve student understanding of course material.Assess and attend to the needs of struggling learners.Improve accuracy in grading.Allow instructors to assess and develop their own strengths.Encourage more efficient use of resources at the institutional level.

Researchers and practitioners in educational technology, IT, and the learning sciences will hail the information in "Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice "as a springboard to new levels of student, instructor, and institutional success.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Intelligence Computation and Applications, ISICA 2015, held in Guangzhou, China, in November 2015. The 77 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 189 submissions. The papers feature the most up-to-date research in analysis and theory of evolutionary computation, neural network architectures and learning; neuro-dynamics and neuro-engineering; fuzzy logic and control; collective intelligence and hybrid systems; deep learning; knowledge discovery; learning and reasoning.

This book offers a thorough yet easy-to-read reference guide to various aspects of cloud computing security. It begins with an introduction to the general concepts of cloud computing, followed by a discussion of security aspects that examines how cloud security differs from conventional information security and reviews cloud-specific classes of threats and attacks. A range of varying threats in cloud computing are covered, from threats of data loss and data breaches, to threats to availability and threats posed by malicious insiders. Further, the book discusses attacks launched on different levels, including attacks on the hypervisor, and on the confidentiality of data. Newer types, such as side-channel attacks and resource-freeing attacks, are also described. The work closes by providing a set of general security recommendations for the cloud.

This two volume set LNCS 9049 and LNCS 9050 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2015, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in April 2015. The 63 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 287 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: data mining; data streams and time series; database storage and index; spatio-temporal data; modern computing platform; social networks; information integration and data quality; information retrieval and summarization; security and privacy; outlier and imbalanced data analysis; probabilistic and uncertain data; query processing.

New technologies have enabled us to collect massive amounts of data in many fields. However, our pace of discovering useful information and knowledge from these data falls far behind our pace of collecting the data. Data Mining: Theories, Algorithms, and Examples introduces and explains a comprehensive set of data mining algorithms from various data mining fields. The book reviews theoretical rationales and procedural details of data mining algorithms, including those commonly found in the literature and those presenting considerable difficulty, using small data examples to explain and walk through the algorithms. The book covers a wide range of data mining algorithms, including those commonly found in data mining literature and those not fully covered in most of existing literature due to their considerable difficulty. The book presents a list of software packages that support the data mining algorithms, applications of the data mining algorithms with references, and exercises, along with the solutions manual and PowerPoint slides of lectures. The author takes a practical approach to data mining algorithms so that the data patterns produced can be fully interpreted. This approach enables students to understand theoretical and operational aspects of data mining algorithms and to manually execute the algorithms for a thorough understanding of the data patterns produced by them.

This book introduces a new logic-based multi-paradigm programming language that integrates logic programming, functional programming, dynamic programming with tabling, and scripting, for use in solving combinatorial search problems, including CP, SAT, and MIP (mixed integer programming) based solver modules, and a module for planning that is implemented using tabling. The book is useful for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and practitioners.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts, AIST 2015, held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in April 2015. The 24 full and 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 140 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on analysis of images and videos; pattern recognition and machine learning; social network analysis; text mining and natural language processing.

Data Mining and Multi agent Integration aims to re?ect state of the art research and development of agent mining interaction and integration (for short, agent min ing). The book was motivated by increasing interest and work in the agents data min ing, and vice versa. The interaction and integration comes about from the intrinsic challenges faced by agent technology and data mining respectively; for instance, multi agent systems face the problem of enhancing agent learning capability, and avoiding the uncertainty of self organization and intelligence emergence. Data min ing, if integrated into agent systems, can greatly enhance the learning skills of agents, and assist agents with predication of future states, thus initiating follow up action or intervention. The data mining community is now struggling with mining distributed, interactive and heterogeneous data sources. Agents can be used to man age such data sources for data access, monitoring, integration, and pattern merging from the infrastructure, gateway, message passing and pattern delivery perspectives. These two examples illustrate the potential of agent mining in handling challenges in respective communities. There is an excellent opportunity to create innovative, dual agent mining interac tion and integration technology, tools and systems which will deliver results in one new technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems, DB&IS 2016, held in Riga, Latvia, in July 2016. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology, conceptual modeling and databases; tools, technologies and languages for model-driven development; decision support systems and data mining; advanced systems and technologies; business process modeling and performance measurement; software testing and quality assurance; linguistic components of IS; information technology in teaching and learning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction, SBP 2015, held in Washington, DC, USA, in March/April 2015. The 24 full papers presented together with 36 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 118 submissions. The goal of the conference was to advance our understanding of human behavior through the development and application of mathematical, computational, statistical, simulation, predictive and other models that provide fundamental insights into factors contributing to human socio-cultural dynamics. The topical areas addressed by the papers are social and behavioral sciences, health sciences, engineering, computer and information science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th EUROLAN Summer School on Linguistic Linked Open Data and its Satellite Workshop on Social Media and the Web of Linked Data, RUMOUR 2015, held in Sibiu, Romania, in July 2015. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 12 abstracts of tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Process-Aware Systems, PAS 2015, held in Hangzhou, China, in October 2015. The four revised full papers and two short papers, presented together with five demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 16 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on process modeling and comparison; process data analysis; Cloud workflow applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference of Young Computer Scientists, Engineers and Educators, ICYCSEE 2015, held in Harbin, China, in January 2015. The 61 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 200 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to intelligent computation in Big Data era, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, natural language processing, image processing, MapReduce, social network.

The two-volume set LNCS 8935 and 8936 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, MMM 2015, held in Sydney, Australia, in January 2015. The 49 revised regular papers, 24 poster presentations, were carefully reviewed and selected from 189 submissions. For the three special session, a total of 18 papers were accepted for MMM 2015. The three special sessions are Personal (Big) Data Modeling for Information Access and Retrieval, Social Geo-Media Analytics and Retrieval and Image or video processing, semantic analysis and understanding. In addition, 9 demonstrations and 9 video showcase papers were accepted for MMM 2015. The accepted contributions included in these two volumes represent the state-of-the-art in multimedia modeling research and cover a diverse range of topics including: Image and Video Processing, Multimedia encoding and streaming, applications of multimedia modelling and 3D and augmented reality.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2014, held in Rome, Italy, in October 2014. The 37 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 287 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge discovery and information retrieval; knowledge engineering and ontology development; knowledge management and information sharing.

This, the 25th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains five fully revised selected papers focusing on data and knowledge management systems. Topics covered include a framework consisting of two heuristics with slightly different characteristics to compute the action rating of data stores, a theoretical and experimental study of filter-based equijoins in a MapReduce environment, a constraint programming approach based on constraint reasoning to study the view selection and data placement problem given a limited amount of resources, a formalization and an approximate algorithm to tackle the problem of source selection and query decomposition in federations of SPARQL endpoints, and a matcher factory enabling the generation of a dedicated schema matcher for a given schema matching scenario.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Lanzhou, China, in July 2014. The 45 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 421 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on classification and semi-supervised learning; clustering and kernel; application to recognition; sampling and big data; application to detection; decision tree learning; learning and adaptation; similarity and decision making; learning with uncertainty; improved learning algorithms and applications.

This, the 24th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains extended and revised versions of seven papers presented at the 25th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA 2014, held in Munich, Germany, in September 2014. Following the conference, and two further rounds of reviewing and selection, six extended papers and one invited keynote paper were chosen for inclusion in this special issue. Topics covered include systems modeling, similarity search, bioinformatics, data pricing, k-nearest neighbor querying, database replication, and data anonymization.

This book constitutes thoroughly revised and selected papers from the 10th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications, VISIGRAPP 2015, held in Berlin, Germany, in March 2015. VISIGRAPP comprises GRAPP, International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications; IVAPP, International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications; and VISAPP, International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications. The 23 thoroughly revised and extended papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 529 submissions. The book also contains one invited talk in full-paper length. The regular papers were organized in topical sections named: computer graphics theory and applications; information visualization theory and applications; and computer vision theory and applications.

Earth Observation interacts with space, remote sensing, communication, and information technologies, and plays an increasingly significant role in Earth related scientific studies, resource management, homeland security, topographic mapping, and development of a healthy, sustainable environment and community. Geospatial Technology for Earth Observation provides an in-depth and broad collection of recent progress in Earth observation. Contributed by leading experts in this field, the book covers satellite, airborne and ground remote sensing systems and system integration, sensor orientation, remote sensing physics, image classification and analysis, information extraction, geospatial service, and various application topics, including cadastral mapping, land use change evaluation, water environment monitoring, flood mapping, and decision making support. Geospatial Technology for Earth Observation serves as a valuable training source for researchers, developers, and practitioners in geospatial science and technology industry. It is also suitable as a reference book for upper level college students and graduate students in geospatial technology, geosciences, resource management, and informatics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed papers of the 8th Chinese Conference on The Semantic Web and Web Science, CSWS 2014, held in Wuhan, China, in August 2014. The 22 research papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as ontology reasoning and learning; semantic data generation and management; and semantic technology and applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management, held in Barcelona, Spain, in April 2015. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers address new challenges in geo-spatial data sensing, observation, representation, processing, visualization, sharing and managing. They concern information and communications technology (ICT) as well as management of information and knowledge-based systems.

Modern terrorist networks pose an unprecedented threat to international security. The question of how to neutralize that threat is complicated radically by their fluid, non-hierarchical structures, religious and ideological motivations, and predominantly non-territorial objectives. Governments and militaries are crafting new policies and doctrines to combat terror, but they desperately need new technologies to make these efforts effective. This book collects a wide range of the most current computational research that addresses critical issues for countering terrorism, including: Finding, summarizing, and evaluating relevant information from large and changing data stores; Simulating and predicting enemy acts and outcomes; and Producing actionable intelligence by finding meaningful patterns hidden in huge amounts of noisy data. The book's four sections describe current research on discovering relevant information buried in vast amounts of unstructured data; extracting meaningful information from digitized documents in multiple languages; analyzing graphs and networks to shed light on adversaries' goals and intentions; and developing software systems that enable analysts to model, simulate, and predict the effects of real-world conflicts. The research described in this book is invaluable reading for governmental decision-makers designing new policies to counter terrorist threats, for members of the military, intelligence, and law enforcement communities devising counterterrorism strategies, and for researchers developing more effective methods for knowledge discovery in complicated and diverse datasets.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut The ?ow of academic ideas in the area of computational intelligence has penetrated industry with tremendous speed and persistence. Thousands of applications have proved the practical potential of fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary com- tation, swarm intelligence, and intelligent agents even before their theoretical foundation is completely understood. And the popularity is rising. Some software vendors have pronounced the new machine learning gold rush to "Transfer Data into Gold". New buzzwords like "data mining", "genetic algorithms", and "swarm optimization" have enriched the top executives' vocabulary to make them look more "visionary" for the 21st century. The phrase "fuzzy math" became political jargon after being used by US President George W. Bush in one of the election debates in the campaign in 2000. Even process operators are discussing the perf- mance of neural networks with the same passion as the performance of the Dallas Cowboys. However, for most of the engineers and scientists introducing computational intelligence technologies into practice, looking at the growing number of new approaches, and understanding their theoretical principles and potential for value creation becomes a more and more dif?cult task.

This work presents link prediction similarity measures for social networks that exploit the degree distribution of the networks. In the context of link prediction in dense networks, the text proposes similarity measures based on Markov inequality degree thresholding (MIDTs), which only consider nodes whose degree is above a threshold for a possible link. Also presented are similarity measures based on cliques (CNC, AAC, RAC), which assign extra weight between nodes sharing a greater number of cliques. Additionally, a locally adaptive (LA) similarity measure is proposed that assigns different weights to common nodes based on the degree distribution of the local neighborhood and the degree distribution of the network. In the context of link prediction in dense networks, the text introduces a novel two-phase framework that adds edges to the sparse graph to forma boost graph.