This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction, held in College Park, MD, USA, March 29-31, 2011. The 48 papers and 3 keynotes presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including social network analysis; modeling; machine learning and data mining; social behaviors; public health; cultural aspects; and effects and search.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, ISBRA 2012, held in Dallas, Texas, USA, in May 2012. The 26 revised full papers presented together with five invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 66 submissions. The papers address issues on various aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th IFIP WG 11.3 International Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy, DBSec 2012, held in Paris, France in July 2012. The 17 revised full and 15 short papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on access control, confidentiality and privacy, smart cards security, privacy-preserving technologies, data management, intrusion and malware, probabilistic attacks and protection, and cloud computing.

This two-volume set, consisting of LNCS 6608 and LNCS 6609, constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Linguistics and Intelligent Processing, held in Tokyo, Japan, in February 2011. The 74 full papers, presented together with 4 invited papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 298 submissions. The contents have been ordered according to the following topical sections: lexical resources; syntax and parsing; part-of-speech tagging and morphology; word sense disambiguation; semantics and discourse; opinion mining and sentiment detection; text generation; machine translation and multilingualism; information extraction and information retrieval; text categorization and classification; summarization and recognizing textual entailment; authoring aid, error correction, and style analysis; and speech recognition and generation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, AIS 2012, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in June 2012, collocated with the International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition, IACIAR 2012. The 31 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on autonomous sensors and sensor systems, autonomous systems and intelligent control with applications, intelligent fuzzy systems, intelligent robotics, intelligent knowledge management, swarm and evolutionary methods, and applications

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 34th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2012, held in Barcelona, Spain, in April 2012. The 37 full papers, 28 poster papers and 7 demonstrations presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The contributions are organized in sections named: query representation; blogs and online-community search; semi-structured retrieval; evaluation; applications; retrieval models; image and video retrieval; text and content classification, categorisation, clustering; systems efficiency; industry track; and posters.

The two-volume set LNAI 7301 and 7302 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2012, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in May 2012. The total of 20 revised full papers and 66 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 241 submissions. The papers present new ideas, original research results, and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas. The papers are organized in topical sections on supervised learning: active, ensemble, rare-class and online; unsupervised learning: clustering, probabilistic modeling in the first volume and on pattern mining: networks, graphs, time-series and outlier detection, and data manipulation: pre-processing and dimension reduction in the second volume.

The IEEE ICDM 2004 workshop on the Foundation of Data Mining and the IEEE ICDM 2005 workshop on the Foundation of Semantic Oriented Data and Web Mining focused on topics ranging from the foundations of data mining to new data mining paradigms. The workshops brought together both data mining researchers and practitioners to discuss these two topics while seeking solutions to long standing data mining problems and stimul- ing new data mining research directions. We feel that the papers presented at these workshops may encourage the study of data mining as a scienti?c ?eld and spark new communications and collaborations between researchers and practitioners. Toexpressthevisionsforgedintheworkshopstoawiderangeofdatam- ing researchers and practitioners and foster active participation in the study of foundations of data mining, we edited this volume by involving extended and updated versions of selected papers presented at those workshops as well as some other relevant contributions. The content of this book includes st- ies of foundations of data mining from theoretical, practical, algorithmical, and managerial perspectives. The following is a brief summary of the papers contained in this book.

The two-volume set LNAI 7301 and 7302 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2012, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in May 2012. The total of 20 revised full papers and 66 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 241 submissions. The papers present new ideas, original research results, and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas. The papers are organized in topical sections on supervised learning: active, ensemble, rare-class and online; unsupervised learning: clustering, probabilistic modeling in the first volume and on pattern mining: networks, graphs, time-series and outlier detection, and data manipulation: pre-processing and dimension reduction in the second volume.

Semistructured Database Design provides an essential reference for anyone interested in the effective management of semsistructured data. Since many new and advanced web applications consume a huge amount of such data, there is a growing need to properly design efficient databases.

This volume responds to that need by describing a semantically rich data model for semistructured data, called Object-Relationship-Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS). Focusing on this new model, the book discuss problems and present solutions for a number of topics, including schema extraction, the design of non-redundant storage organizations for semistructured data, and physical semsitructured database design, among others.

Semistructured Database Design, presents researchers and professionals with the most complete and up-to-date research in this fast-growing field.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. Current decentralized systems still focus on data and knowledge as their main resource. Feasibility of these systems relies basically on P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques and the support of agent systems with scaling and decentralized control. Synergy between Grids, P2P systems, and agent technologies is the key to data- and knowledge-centered systems in large-scale environments. This, the fifth issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems, contains nine selected full-length papers, focusing on the topics of query processing, information extraction, management of dataspaces and contents, and mobile applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2012, held in Coimbra, Portugal in April 2012. The 24 revised full papers and 23 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. These papers cover the areas related to phonology, morphology and POS-Tagging, acquisition, language resources, linguistic description, syntax and parsing, semantics, opinion analysis, natural language processing applications, speech production and phonetics, speech resources, speech processing and applications.

The objective is to provide the latest developments in the area of soft computing. These are the cutting edge technologies that have immense application in various fields. All the papers will undergo the peer review process to maintain the quality of work.

This is the second edition of the comprehensive treatment of statistical inference using permutation techniques. It makes available to practitioners a variety of useful and powerful data analytic tools that rely on very few distributional assumptions. Although many of these procedures have appeared in journal articles, they are not readily available to practitioners. This new and updated edition places increased emphasis on the use of alternative permutation statistical tests based on metric Euclidean distance functions that have excellent robustness characteristics. These alternative permutation techniques provide many powerful multivariate tests including multivariate multiple regression analyses.

The area of similarity searching is a very hot topic for both research and c- mercial applications. Current data processing applications use data with c- siderably less structure and much less precise queries than traditional database systems. Examples are multimedia data like images or videos that offer query by example search, product catalogs that provide users with preference based search, scientific data records from observations or experimental analyses such as biochemical and medical data, or XML documents that come from hetero- neous data sources on the Web or in intranets and thus does not exhibit a global schema. Such data can neither be ordered in a canonical manner nor meani- fully searched by precise database queries that would return exact matches. This novel situation is what has given rise to similarity searching, also - ferred to as content based or similarity retrieval. The most general approach to similarity search, still allowing construction of index structures, is modeled in metric space. In this book. Prof. Zezula and his co authors provide the first monograph on this topic, describing its theoretical background as well as the practical search tools of this innovative technology.

Privacy preserving data mining implies the "mining" of knowledge from distributed data without violating the privacy of the individual/corporations involved in contributing the data. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of available approaches, techniques and open problems in privacy preserving data mining. Crystallizing much of the underlying foundation, the book aims to inspire further research in this new and growing area.

Privacy Preserving Data Mining is intended to be accessible to industry practitioners and policy makers, to help inform future decision making and legislation, and to serve as a useful technical reference.

The three-volume set LNAI 7196, LNAI 7197 and LNAI 7198 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems, ACIIDS 2012, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in March 2012. The 161 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 472 submissions. The papers included cover the following topics: intelligent database systems, data warehouses and data mining, natural language processing and computational linguistics, semantic Web, social networks and recommendation systems, collaborative systems and applications, e-bussiness and e-commerce systems, e-learning systems, information modeling and requirements engineering, information retrieval systems, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, intelligent information systems, intelligent internet systems, intelligent optimization techniques, object-relational DBMS, ontologies and knowledge sharing, semi-structured and XML database systems, unified modeling language and unified processes, Web services and semantic Web, computer networks and communication systems.

The three-volume set LNAI 7196, LNAI 7197 and LNAI 7198 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Asian Conference on Intelligent Information and Database Systems, ACIIDS 2012, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in March 2012. The 161 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 472 submissions. The papers included cover the following topics: intelligent database systems, data warehouses and data mining, natural language processing and computational linguistics, semantic Web, social networks and recommendation systems, collaborative systems and applications, e-bussiness and e-commerce systems, e-learning systems, information modeling and requirements engineering, information retrieval systems, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, intelligent information systems, intelligent internet systems, intelligent optimization techniques, object-relational DBMS, ontologies and knowledge sharing, semi-structured and XML database systems, unified modeling language and unified processes, Web services and semantic Web, computer networks and communication systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on the Theory and Applications of Formal Argumentation, TAFA 2011, held in Barcelona, Spain, in Juli 2011, as a workshop at IJCAI 2011, the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The 9 revised full papers presented together with 8 revised poster papers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 32 initial submissions. The workshop promotes and fosters uptake of argumentation as a viable AI paradigm with wide ranging application, and provides a forum for further development of ideas and the initiation of new and innovative collaborations. The papers cover the following topics: properties of formal models of argumentation; instantiations of abstract argumentation frameworks; relationships among different argumentation frameworks; practical applications of formal models of argumentation; argumentation and other artificial intelligence techniques; evaluation of formal models of argumentation; validation and evaluation of applications of argumentation.

The two-volume set LNCS 6987 and LNCS 6988 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Mining, WISM 2011, held in Taiyuan, China, in September 2011. The 112 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 472 submissions. The first volume includes 56 papers organized in the following topical sections: applications on Web information systems; applications of Web mining; distributed systems; e-government and e-commerce; geographic information systems; information security; and intelligent networked systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International Conference on Scale Space Methods and Variational Methods in Computer Vision, SSVM 2011, held in Ein-Gedi, Israel in May/June 2011.
The 24 revised full papers presented together with 44 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on denoising and enhancement, segmentation, image representation and invariants, shape analysis, and optical flow.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of five international workshops held in conjunction with PAKDD 2011 in Shenzhen, China, in May 2011: the International Workshop on Behavior Informatics (BI 2011), the Workshop on Quality Issues, Measures of Interestingness and Evaluation of Data Mining Models (QIMIE 2011), the Workshop on Biologically Inspired Techniques for Data Mining (BDM 2011), the Workshop on Advances and Issues in Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinical Data Mining (AI-TCM 2011), and the Second Workshop on Data Mining for Healthcare Management (DMGHM 2011). The book also includes papers from the First PAKDD Doctoral Symposium on Data Mining (DSDM 2011). The 42 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics discussing emerging techniques in the field of knowledge discovery in databases and their application domains extending to previously unexplored areas such as data mining based on optimization techniques from biological behavior of animals and applications in Traditional Chinese Medicine clinical research and health care management.

Exploratory data analysis, also known as data mining or knowledge discovery from databases, is typically based on the optimisation of a specific function of a dataset. Such optimisation is often performed with gradient descent or variations thereof. In this book, we first lay the groundwork by reviewing some standard clustering algorithms and projection algorithms before presenting various non-standard criteria for clustering. The family of algorithms developed are shown to perform better than the standard clustering algorithms on a variety of datasets. We then consider extensions of the basic mappings which maintain some topology of the original data space. Finally we show how reinforcement learning can be used as a clustering mechanism before turning to projection methods. We show that several varieties of reinforcement learning may also be used to define optimal projections for example for principal component analysis, exploratory projection pursuit and canonical correlation analysis. The new method of cross entropy adaptation is then introduced and used as a means of optimising projections. Finally an artificial immune system is used to create optimal projections and combinations of these three methods are shown to outperform the individual methods of optimisation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Agents and Data Mining Interaction, ADMI 2011, held in Taipei, Taiwan, in May 2011 in conjunction with AAMAS 2011, the 10th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
The 11 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents for data mining; data mining for agents; and agent mining applications.

Social computing concerns the study of social behavior and context based on computational systems. Behavioral modeling reproduces the social behavior, and allows for experimenting with and deep understanding of behavior, patterns, and potential outcomes. The pervasive use of computer and Internet technologies provides an unprecedented environment where people can share opinions and experiences, offer suggestions and advice, debate, and even conduct experiments. Social computing facilitates behavioral modeling in model building, analysis, pattern mining, anticipation, and prediction. The proceedings from this interdisciplinary workshop provide a platform for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students from sociology, behavioral and computer science, psychology, cultural study, information systems, and operations research to share results and develop new concepts and methodologies aimed at advancing and deepening our understanding of social and behavioral computing to aid critical decision making.