This book explores the concepts of data mining and data warehousing, a promising and flourishing frontier in database systems, and presents a broad, yet in-depth overview of the field of data mining. Data mining is a multidisciplinary field, drawing work from areas including database technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, statistics, pattern recognition, knowledge based systems, knowledge acquisition, information retrieval, high performance computing and data visualization.

Advances in social science research methodologies and data analytic methods are changing the way research in information systems is conducted. New developments in statistical software technologies for data mining (DM) such as regression splines or decision tree induction can be used to assist researchers in systematic post-positivist theory testing and development. Established management science techniques like data envelopment analysis (DEA), and value focused thinking (VFT) can be used in combination with traditional statistical analysis and data mining techniques to more effectively explore behavioral questions in information systems research. As adoption and use of these research methods expand, there is growing need for a resource book to assist doctoral students and advanced researchers in understanding their potential to contribute to a broad range of research problems. Advances in Research Methods for Information Systems Research: Data Mining, Data Envelopment Analysis, Value Focused Thinking focuses on bridging and unifying these three different methodologies in order to bring them together in a unified volume for the information systems community. This book serves as a resource that provides overviews on each method, as well as applications on how they can be employed to address IS research problems. Its goal is to help researchers in their continuous efforts to set the pace for having an appropriate interplay between behavioral research and design science.

This book provides a timely and unique survey of next-generation social computational methodologies. The text explains the fundamentals of this field, and describes state-of-the-art methods for inferring social status, relationships, preferences, intentions, personalities, needs, and lifestyles from human information in unconstrained visual data. Topics and features: includes perspectives from an international and interdisciplinary selection of pre-eminent authorities; presents balanced coverage of both detailed theoretical analysis and real-world applications; examines social relationships in human-centered media for the development of socially-aware video, location-based, and multimedia applications; reviews techniques for recognizing the social roles played by people in an event, and for classifying human-object interaction activities; discusses the prediction and recognition of human attributes via social media analytics, including social relationships, facial age and beauty, and occupation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks, EANN 2016, held in Aberdeen, UK, in September 2016. The 22 revised full papers and three short papers presented together with two tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on active learning and dynamic environments; semi-supervised modeling; classification applications; clustering applications; cyber-physical systems and cloud applications; time-series prediction; learning-algorithms.

This comprehensive textbook/reference presents a focused review of the state of the art in privacy research, encompassing a range of diverse topics. The first book of its kind designed specifically to cater to courses on privacy, this authoritative volume provides technical, legal, and ethical perspectives on privacy issues from a global selection of renowned experts. Features: examines privacy issues relating to databases, P2P networks, big data technologies, social networks, and digital information networks; describes the challenges of addressing privacy concerns in various areas; reviews topics of privacy in electronic health systems, smart grid technology, vehicular ad-hoc networks, mobile devices, location-based systems, and crowdsourcing platforms; investigates approaches for protecting privacy in cloud applications; discusses the regulation of personal information disclosure and the privacy of individuals; presents the tools and the evidence to better understand consumers' privacy behaviors.

This thesis focuses on the problem of optimizing the quality of network multimedia services. This problem spans multiple domains, from subjective perception of multimedia quality to computer networks management. The work done in this thesis approaches the problem at different levels, developing methods for modeling the subjective perception of quality based on objectively measurable parameters of the multimedia coding process as well as the transport over computer networks. The modeling of subjective perception is motivated by work done in psychophysics, while using Machine Learning techniques to map network conditions to the human perception of video services. Furthermore, the work develops models for efficient control of multimedia systems operating in dynamic networked environments with the goal of delivering optimized Quality of Experience. Overall this thesis delivers a set of methods for monitoring and optimizing the quality of multimedia services that adapt to the dynamic environment of computer networks in which they operate.

Information Systems (IS) as a discipline draws on diverse areas including, technology, organisational theory, management and social science. The field is recognized as very broad and encompassing many themes and areas. However, the development of artefacts, or information systems development (ISD), in the broadest sense, is a central concern of the discipline. Significantly, ISD impacts on the organisational and societal contexts through the use of the artefacts constructed by the development. Today, that impact also needs to be evaluated in terms of its effects on the environment. Sustainable, or "green," IT is a catch-all term used to describe the development, manufacture, management, use and disposal of ICT in a way that minimizes damage to the environment. As a result, the term has many different meanings, depending on the role assumed in the life span of the ICT artefact. The theme of the proposed work is to critically examine the whole range of issues around ISD from the perspective of sustainability. Sustainable IT is an emerging theme in academic research and industry practice in response to an individual concern for the environment and the embryonic regulatory environments being enacted globally to address the environmental impact of ICT. In this work we intend to bring together in one volume the diverse research around the development of sustainable IS.

Proper analysis of image and multimedia data requires efficient extraction and segmentation techniques. Among the many computational intelligence approaches, the soft computing paradigm is best equipped with several tools and techniques that incorporate intelligent concepts and principles. This book is dedicated to object extraction, image segmentation, and edge detection using soft computing techniques with extensive real-life application to image and multimedia data. The authors start with a comprehensive tutorial on the basics of brain structure and learning, and then the key soft computing techniques, including evolutionary computation, neural networks, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, and rough sets. They then present seven chapters that detail the application of representative techniques to complex image processing tasks such as image recognition, lighting control, target tracking, object extraction, and edge detection. These chapters follow a structured approach with detailed explanations of the problems, solutions, results, and conclusions. This is both a standalone textbook for graduates in computer science, electrical engineering, system science, and information technology, and a reference for researchers and engineers engaged with pattern recognition, image processing, and soft computing.

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.

Many important planning decisions in society and business depend on proper knowledge and a correct understanding of movement, be it in transportation, logistics, biology, or the life sciences. Today the widespread use of mobile phones and technologies like GPS and RFID provides an immense amount of data on location and movement. What is needed are new methods of visualization and algorithmic data analysis that are tightly integrated and complement each other to allow end-users and analysts to extract useful knowledge from these extremely large data volumes. This is exactly the topic of this book. As the authors show, modern visual analytics techniques are ready to tackle the enormous challenges brought about by movement data, and the technology and software needed to exploit them are available today. The authors start by illustrating the different kinds of data available to describe movement, from individual trajectories of single objects to multiple trajectories of many objects, and then proceed to detail a conceptual framework, which provides the basis for a fundamental understanding of movement data. With this basis, they move on to more practical and technical aspects, focusing on how to transform movement data to make it more useful, and on the infrastructure necessary for performing visual analytics in practice. In so doing they demonstrate that visual analytics of movement data can yield exciting insights into the behavior of moving persons and objects, but can also lead to an understanding of the events that transpire when things move. Throughout the book, they use sample applications from various domains and illustrate the examples with graphical depictions of both the interactive displays and the analysis results. In summary, readers will benefit from this detailed description of the state of the art in visual analytics in various ways. Researchers will appreciate the scientific precision involved, software technologists will find essential information on algorithms and systems, and practitioners will profit from readily accessible examples with detailed illustrations for practical purposes.

This book explains the Linked Data domain by adopting a bottom-up approach: it introduces the fundamental Semantic Web technologies and building blocks, which are then combined into methodologies and end-to-end examples for publishing datasets as Linked Data, and use cases that harness scholarly information and sensor data. It presents how Linked Data is used for web-scale data integration, information management and search. Special emphasis is given to the publication of Linked Data from relational databases as well as from real-time sensor data streams. The authors also trace the transformation from the document-based World Wide Web into a Web of Data. Materializing the Web of Linked Data is addressed to researchers and professionals studying software technologies, tools and approaches that drive the Linked Data ecosystem, and the Web in general.

Prevalent types of data in scientific visualization are volumetric data, vector field data, and particle-based data. Particle data typically originates from measurements and simulations in various fields, such as life sciences or physics. The particles are often visualized directly, that is, by simple representants like spheres. Interactive rendering facilitates the exploration and visual analysis of the data. With increasing data set sizes in terms of particle numbers, interactive high-quality visualization is a challenging task. This is especially true for dynamic data or abstract representations that are based on the raw particle data. This book covers direct particle visualization using simple glyphs as well as abstractions that are application-driven such as clustering and aggregation. It targets visualization researchers and developers who are interested in visualization techniques for large, dynamic particle-based data. Its explanations focus on GPU-accelerated algorithms for high-performance rendering and data processing that run in real-time on modern desktop hardware. Consequently, the implementation of said algorithms and the required data structures to make use of the capabilities of modern graphics APIs are discussed in detail. Furthermore, it covers GPU-accelerated methods for the generation of application-dependent abstract representations. This includes various representations commonly used in application areas such as structural biology, systems biology, thermodynamics, and astrophysics.

This unique text/reference describes an exciting and novel approach to supercomputing in the DataFlow paradigm. The major advantages and applications of this approach are clearly described, and a detailed explanation of the programming model is provided using simple yet effective examples. The work is developed from a series of lecture courses taught by the authors in more than 40 universities across more than 20 countries, and from research carried out by Maxeler Technologies, Inc. Topics and features: presents a thorough introduction to DataFlow supercomputing for big data problems; reviews the latest research on the DataFlow architecture and its applications; introduces a new method for the rapid handling of real-world challenges involving large datasets; provides a case study on the use of the new approach to accelerate the Cooley-Tukey algorithm on a DataFlow machine; includes a step-by-step guide to the web-based integrated development environment WebIDE.

This book comprises a set of articles that specify the methodology of text mining, describe the creation of lexical resources in the framework of text mining and use text mining for various tasks in natural language processing (NLP). The analysis of large amounts of textual data is a prerequisite to build lexical resources such as dictionaries and ontologies and also has direct applications in automated text processing in fields such as history, healthcare and mobile applications, just to name a few. This volume gives an update in terms of the recent gains in text mining methods and reflects the most recent achievements with respect to the automatic build-up of large lexical resources. It addresses researchers that already perform text mining, and those who want to enrich their battery of methods. Selected articles can be used to support graduate-level teaching. The book is suitable for all readers that completed undergraduate studies of computational linguistics, quantitative linguistics, computer science and computational humanities. It assumes basic knowledge of computer science and corpus processing as well as of statistics.

This book describes process mining use cases and business impact along the value chain, from corporate to local applications, representing the state of the art in domain know-how. Providing a set of industrial case studies and best practices, it complements academic publications on the topic. Further the book reveals the challenges and failures in order to offer readers practical insights and guidance on how to avoid the pitfalls and ensure successful operational deployment. The book is divided into three parts: Part I provides an introduction to the topic from fundamental principles to key success factors, and an overview of operational use cases. As a holistic description of process mining in a business environment, this part is particularly useful for readers not yet familiar with the topic. Part II presents detailed use cases written by contributors from a variety of functions and industries. Lastly, Part III provides a brief overview of the future of process mining, both from academic and operational perspectives. Based on a solid academic foundation, process mining has received increasing interest from operational businesses, with many companies already reaping the benefits. As the first book to present an overview of successful industrial applications, it is of particular interest to professionals who want to learn more about the possibilities and opportunities this new technology offers. It is also a valuable resource for researchers looking for empirical results when considering requirements for enhancements and further developments.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Intelligent Systems, PKAW 2016, held in Phuket, Thailand, in August 2016. The 16 full papers and 5 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 initial submissions. They deal with knowledge acquisition and machine learning; knowledge acquisition and natural language processing; knowledge acquisition from network and big data; and knowledge acquisition and applications.

Using network models to investigate the interconnectivity in modern economic systems allows researchers to better understand and explain some economic phenomena. This volume presents contributions by known experts and active researchers in economic and financial network modeling. Readers are provided with an understanding of the latest advances in network analysis as applied to economics, finance, corporate governance, and investments. Moreover, recent advances in market network analysis that focus on influential techniques for market graph analysis are also examined. Young researchers will find this volume particularly useful in facilitating their introduction to this new and fascinating field. Professionals in economics, financial management, various technologies, and network analysis, will find the network models presented in this book beneficial in analyzing the interconnectivity in modern economic systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Systems Simulation, Asia Simulation 2015, held in Jeju, Korea, in November 2016.The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 126 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on model and design; simulation and analysis.

This, the 27th issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains extended and revised versions of 12 papers presented at the Big Data and Technology for Complex Urban Systems symposium, held in Kauai, HI, USA in January 2016. The papers explore the use of big data in complex urban systems in the areas of politics, society, commerce, tax, and emergency management.

In this book, the authors describe how Mind Genomics works - a revolutionary marketing method that combines the three sciences of Mathematics, Psychology, and Economics - in a masterful way. Mind Genomics helps the seller of products and services to know what people are thinking about them before one ever commits to an approach by knowing what is important to the people one is trying to influence. Mind Genomics identifies what aspects of a general topic are important to the audience, how different people in the audience will respond to different aspects of that topic, and how to pinpoint the viewpoints of different audience segments to each aspect of the topic. A careful step by step approach explains what activities ought to be taken and what scenarios must be followed while applying this method in order to find the right way to capture the hearts and minds of targeted audiences. This book explains how Mind Genomics plays a matching game with one's potential audience and various ways one can present the products and ideas resulting in a systematic approach to influencing others, backed by real data; how one can play with ideas, see patterns imposed by the mind and create new, inductive, applied sciences of the mind, measuring the world using the mind of man as the yardstick. In details it describes how everyday thought is transferred into actionable data and results. Whether one is a senior marketer for a large corporation, a professor at a university, or administrator at a hospital, one could use Mind Genomics to learn how to transform available information into actionable steps that will increase the products sales, or increase the number of interested students for a new university program, or the number of satisfied patients in the hospital with their medical conditions kept at highest levels after leaving it. Mind Genomics was first introduced by Dr. Howard Moskowitz, an alumnus of Harvard University and the father of Horizontal Segmentation - a widely accepted business model for targeted marketing and profit maximization.

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 book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Well-Being in the Information Society, WIS 2016, held in Tampere, Finland, in September 2016. The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. With the core topic "Building Sustainable Health Ecosystems" WIS 2016 focused on innovations and fresh ideas in the cross-section of urban living, information society and health as understood in a wide sense. The papers presented in this volume are organized along the following seven broad topics: 1. Macro level considerations of e-health and welfare, 2.Welfare issues of children, youth, young elderly and seniors, 3. Analytics issues of eHealth and welfare, 4. National/regional initiatives in eHealth and welfare, and 5. Specific topics of eHealth. The papers in these topics span qualitative and quantitative analysis, empirical surveys, case studies as well as conceptual work.

This book offers a coherent and comprehensive approach to feature subset selection in the scope of classification problems, explaining the foundations, real application problems and the challenges of feature selection for high-dimensional data. The authors first focus on the analysis and synthesis of feature selection algorithms, presenting a comprehensive review of basic concepts and experimental results of the most well-known algorithms. They then address different real scenarios with high-dimensional data, showing the use of feature selection algorithms in different contexts with different requirements and information: microarray data, intrusion detection, tear film lipid layer classification and cost-based features. The book then delves into the scenario of big dimension, paying attention to important problems under high-dimensional spaces, such as scalability, distributed processing and real-time processing, scenarios that open up new and interesting challenges for researchers. The book is useful for practitioners, researchers and graduate students in the areas of machine learning and data mining.

This book reports on cutting-edge research carried out within the context of the EU-funded Dicode project, which aims at facilitating and augmenting collaboration and decision making in data-intensive and cognitively complex settings. Whenever appropriate, Dicode builds on prominent high-performance computing paradigms and large data processing technologies to meaningfully search, analyze, and aggregate data from diverse, extremely large and rapidly evolving sources. The Dicode approach and services are fully explained and particular emphasis is placed on deepening insights regarding the exploitation of big data, as well as on collaboration and issues relating to sense-making support. Building on current advances, the solution developed in the Dicode project brings together the reasoning capabilities of both the machine and humans. It can be viewed as an innovative "workbench" incorporating and orchestrating a set of interoperable services that reduce the data intensiveness and complexity overload at critical decision points to a manageable level, thus permitting stakeholders to be more productive and effective in their work practices.

This book shows how to look at ways of visualizing large datasets, whether large in numbers of cases, or large in numbers of variables, or large in both. All ideas are illustrated with displays from analyses of real datasets and the importance of interpreting displays effectively is emphasized. Graphics should be drawn to convey information and the book includes many insightful examples. New approaches to graphics are needed to visualize the information in large datasets and most of the innovations described in this book are developments of standard graphics. The book is accessible to readers with some experience of drawing statistical graphics.