Computers and computer networks are one of the most incredible inventions of the 20th century, having an ever-expanding role in our daily lives by enabling complex human activities in areas such as entertainment, education, and commerce. One of the most challenging problems in computer science for the 21st century is to improve the design of distributed systems where computing devices have to work together as a team to achieve common goals. In this book, I have tried to gently introduce the general reader to some of the most fundamental issues and classical results of computer science underlying the design of algorithms for distributed systems, so that the reader can get a feel of the nature of this exciting and fascinating field called distributed computing. The book will appeal to the educated layperson and requires no computer-related background. I strongly suspect that also most computer-knowledgeable readers will be able to learn something new.

This book offers advanced parallel and distributed algorithms and experimental laboratory prototypes of unconventional shortest path solvers. In addition, it presents novel and unique algorithms of solving shortest problems in massively parallel cellular automaton machines. The shortest path problem is a fundamental and classical problem in graph theory and computer science and is frequently applied in the contexts of transport and logistics, telecommunication networks, virtual reality and gaming, geometry, and social networks analysis. Software implementations include distance-vector algorithms for distributed path computation in dynamics networks, parallel solutions of the constrained shortest path problem, and application of the shortest path solutions in gathering robotic swarms. Massively parallel algorithms utilise cellular automata, where a shortest path is computed either via matrix multiplication in automaton arrays, or via the representation of data graphs in automaton lattices and using the propagation of wave-like patterns. Unconventional shortest path solvers are presented in computer models of foraging behaviour and protoplasmic network optimisation by the slime mould Physarum polycephalum and fluidic devices, while experimental laboratory prototypes of path solvers using chemical media, flows and droplets, and electrical current are also highlighted. The book will be a pleasure to explore for readers from all walks of life, from undergraduate students to university professors, from mathematicians, computers scientists and engineers to chemists and biologists.

With the growing popularity of "big data", the potential value of personal data has attracted more and more attention. Applications built on personal data can create tremendous social and economic benefits. Meanwhile, they bring serious threats to individual privacy. The extensive collection, analysis and transaction of personal data make it difficult for an individual to keep the privacy safe. People now show more concerns about privacy than ever before. How to make a balance between the exploitation of personal information and the protection of individual privacy has become an urgent issue. In this book, the authors use methodologies from economics, especially game theory, to investigate solutions to the balance issue. They investigate the strategies of stakeholders involved in the use of personal data, and try to find the equilibrium. The book proposes a user-role based methodology to investigate the privacy issues in data mining, identifying four different types of users, i.e. four user roles, involved in data mining applications. For each user role, the authors discuss its privacy concerns and the strategies that it can adopt to solve the privacy problems. The book also proposes a simple game model to analyze the interactions among data provider, data collector and data miner. By solving the equilibria of the proposed game, readers can get useful guidance on how to deal with the trade-off between privacy and data utility. Moreover, to elaborate the analysis on data collector's strategies, the authors propose a contract model and a multi-armed bandit model respectively. The authors discuss how the owners of data (e.g. an individual or a data miner) deal with the trade-off between privacy and utility in data mining. Specifically, they study users' strategies in collaborative filtering based recommendation system and distributed classification system. They built game models to formulate the interactions among data owners, and propose learning algorithms to find the equilibria.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B, TLA, VDM, and Z, ABZ 2016, held in Southampton, UK, in June 2018. The 20 full and 11 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. They record the latest research developments in state-based formal methods Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B, Circus, Event-B, TLS+, VDM and Z.

This book addresses agent-based computing, concentrating in particular on evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS), which have been developed since 1996 at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland. It provides the relevant background information on and a detailed description of this computing paradigm, along with key experimental results. Readers will benefit from the insightful discussion, which primarily concerns the efficient implementation of computing frameworks for developing EMAS and similar computing systems, as well as a detailed formal model. Theoretical deliberations demonstrating that computing with EMAS always helps to find the optimal solution are also included, rounding out the coverage.

This book not only provides a comprehensive introduction to neural-based PCA methods in control science, but also presents many novel PCA algorithms and their extensions and generalizations, e.g., dual purpose, coupled PCA, GED, neural based SVD algorithms, etc. It also discusses in detail various analysis methods for the convergence, stabilizing, self-stabilizing property of algorithms, and introduces the deterministic discrete-time systems method to analyze the convergence of PCA/MCA algorithms. Readers should be familiar with numerical analysis and the fundamentals of statistics, such as the basics of least squares and stochastic algorithms. Although it focuses on neural networks, the book only presents their learning law, which is simply an iterative algorithm. Therefore, no a priori knowledge of neural networks is required. This book will be of interest and serve as a reference source to researchers and students in applied mathematics, statistics, engineering, and other related fields.

This book covers basic fundamentals of logic design and advanced RTL design concepts using VHDL. The book is organized to describe both simple and complex RTL design scenarios using VHDL. It gives practical information on the issues in ASIC prototyping using FPGAs, design challenges and how to overcome practical issues and concerns. It describes how to write an efficient RTL code using VHDL and how to improve the design performance. The design guidelines by using VHDL are also explained with the practical examples in this book. The book also covers the ALTERA and XILINX FPGA architecture and the design flow for the PLDs. The contents of this book will be useful to students, researchers, and professionals working in hardware design and optimization. The book can also be used as a text for graduate and professional development courses.

This volume of LNCSE is a collection of the papers from the proceedings of the third workshop on sparse grids and applications. Sparse grids are a popular approach for the numerical treatment of high-dimensional problems. Where classical numerical discretization schemes fail in more than three or four dimensions, sparse grids, in their different guises, are frequently the method of choice, be it spatially adaptive in the hierarchical basis or via the dimensionally adaptive combination technique. Demonstrating once again the importance of this numerical discretization scheme, the selected articles present recent advances on the numerical analysis of sparse grids as well as efficient data structures. The book also discusses a range of applications, including uncertainty quantification and plasma physics.

Numerical computation, knowledge discovery and statistical data analysis integrated with powerful 2D and 3D graphics for visualization are the key topics of this book. The Python code examples powered by the Java platform can easily be transformed to other programming languages, such as Java, Groovy, Ruby and BeanShell. This book equips the reader with a computational platform which, unlike other statistical programs, is not limited by a single programming language.The author focuses on practical programming aspects and covers a broad range of topics, from basic introduction to the Python language on the Java platform (Jython), to descriptive statistics, symbolic calculations, neural networks, non-linear regression analysis and many other data-mining topics. He discusses how to find regularities in real-world data, how to classify data, and how to process data for knowledge discoveries. The code snippets are so short that they easily fit into single pages. Numeric Computation and Statistical Data Analysis on the Java Platform is a great choice for those who want to learn how statistical data analysis can be done using popular programming languages, who want to integrate data analysis algorithms in full-scale applications, and deploy such calculations on the web pages or computational servers regardless of their operating system. It is an excellent reference for scientific computations to solve real-world problems using a comprehensive stack of open-source Java libraries included in the DataMelt (DMelt) project and will be appreciated by many data-analysis scientists, engineers and students.

This book provides an overview of the resources and research projects that are bringing Big Data and High Performance Computing (HPC) on converging tracks. It demystifies Big Data and HPC for the reader by covering the primary resources, middleware, applications, and tools that enable the usage of HPC platforms for Big Data management and processing.Through interesting use-cases from traditional and non-traditional HPC domains, the book highlights the most critical challenges related to Big Data processing and management, and shows ways to mitigate them using HPC resources. Unlike most books on Big Data, it covers a variety of alternatives to Hadoop, and explains the differences between HPC platforms and Hadoop.Written by professionals and researchers in a range of departments and fields, this book is designed for anyone studying Big Data and its future directions. Those studying HPC will also find the content valuable.

Do you know how banking and money will look like in the new digital age? This book collects the voices of leading scholars, entrepreneurs, policy makers and consultants who, through their expertise and keen analytical skills, are best positioned to picture from various angles the ongoing technological revolution in banking and finance. You will learn how lending and borrowing can exist without banks; how new forms of money can compete to better serve different society needs; how new technologies are banking the unbanked communities in the poorest parts of the world, and how ideas and small projects can be financed by the crowds without the need to rely upon banks. You will learn how, in the new digital age, we will interact with new self-organised and autonomous companies that operate without any human involvement, based on a set of programmed and incorruptible rules. You will learn that new business models will emerge thanks to technology-enabled platforms, upon which one can build new forms of non-hierarchical cooperation between strangers. And you will also learn that new forms of risks and threats are emerging that will destabilise our systems and jeopardise the stability of our financial order.

This stimulating textbook presents a broad and accessible guide to the fundamentals of discrete mathematics, highlighting how the techniques may be applied to various exciting areas in computing. The text is designed to motivate and inspire the reader, encouraging further study in this important skill. Features: provides an introduction to the building blocks of discrete mathematics, including sets, relations and functions; describes the basics of number theory, the techniques of induction and recursion, and the applications of mathematical sequences, series, permutations, and combinations; presents the essentials of algebra; explains the fundamentals of automata theory, matrices, graph theory, cryptography, coding theory, language theory, and the concepts of computability and decidability; reviews the history of logic, discussing propositional and predicate logic, as well as advanced topics; examines the field of software engineering, describing formal methods; investigates probability and statistics.

The book is an authoritative collection of contributions by leading experts on the topics of fuzzy logic, multi-valued logic and neural network. Originally written as an homage to Claudio Moraga, seen by his colleagues as an example of concentration, discipline and passion for science, the book also represents a timely reference guide for advance students and researchers in the field of soft computing, and multiple-valued logic.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Computer Science Symposium in Russia, CSR 2018, held in Moscow, Russia, in May 2018. The 24 full papers presented together with 7 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics such as algorithms and data structures; combinatorial optimization; constraint solving; computational complexity; cryptography; combinatorics in computer science; formal languages and automata; algorithms for concurrent and distributed systems; networks; and proof theory and applications of logic to computer science.

This book introduces readers to modern computational mechanics based on the finite element method. It helps students succeed in mechanics courses by showing them how to apply the fundamental knowledge they gained in the first years of their engineering education to more advanced topics. In order to deepen readers' understanding of the derived equations and theories, each chapter also includes supplementary problems. These problems start with fundamental knowledge questions on the theory presented in the chapter, followed by calculation problems. In total over 80 such calculation problems are provided, along with brief solutions for each. This book is especially designed to meet the needs of Australian students, reviewing the mathematics covered in their first two years at university. The 13-week course comprises three hours of lectures and two hours of tutorials per week.

This book presents the first "How To" guide to the use of radial basis functions (RBF). It provides a clear vision of their potential, an overview of ready-for-use computational tools and precise guidelines to implement new engineering applications of RBF. Radial basis functions (RBF) are a mathematical tool mature enough for useful engineering applications. Their mathematical foundation is well established and the tool has proven to be effective in many fields, as the mathematical framework can be adapted in several ways. A candidate application can be faced considering the features of RBF: multidimensional space (including 2D and 3D), numerous radial functions available, global and compact support, interpolation/regression. This great flexibility makes RBF attractive - and their great potential has only been partially discovered. This is because of the difficulty in taking a first step toward RBF as they are not commonly part of engineers' cultural background, but also due to the numerical complexity of RBF problems that scales up very quickly with the number of RBF centers. Fast RBF algorithms are available to alleviate this and high-performance computing (HPC) can provide further aid. Nevertheless, a consolidated tradition in using RBF in engineering applications is still missing and the beginner can be confused by the literature, which in many cases is presented with language and symbolisms familiar to mathematicians but which can be cryptic for engineers. The book is divided in two main sections. The first covers the foundations of RBF, the tools available for their quick implementation and guidelines for facing new challenges; the second part is a collection of practical RBF applications in engineering, covering several topics, including response surface interpolation in n-dimensional spaces, mapping of magnetic loads, mapping of pressure loads, up-scaling of flow fields, stress/strain analysis by experimental displacement fields, implicit surfaces, mesh to cad deformation, mesh morphing for crack propagation in 3D, ice and snow accretion using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data, shape optimization for external aerodynamics, and use of adjoint data for surface sculpting. For each application, the complete path is clearly and consistently exposed using the systematic approach defined in the first section.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 28th International Workshopon Combinatorial Algorithms, IWOCA 2017, held in Newcastle, NSW, Australia, in July 2017.The 30 regular papers presented in this volume together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. They were organized in topical sessions named: approximation algorithms and hardness; computational complexity; computational geometry; graphs and combinatorics; graph colourings, labellings and power domination; heuristics; mixed integer programming; polynomial algorithms; privacy; and string algorithms.

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles of Security and Trust, POST 2018, which took place in Thessaloniki, Greece, in April 2018, held as part of the European Joint Conference on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2018. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: information flow and non-intereference; leakage, information flow, and protocols; smart contracts and privacy; firewalls and attack-defense trees.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Artificial Life and Intelligent Agents, ALIA 2016, held in Birmingham, UK, in June 2016. The 8 revised full papers and three revised short papers presented together with two demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on modelling; robotics; bio-inspired problem solving; human-like systems; applications and games.

This book offers an introduction to applications prompted by tensor analysis, especially by the spectral tensor theory developed in recent years. It covers applications of tensor eigenvalues in multilinear systems, exponential data fitting, tensor complementarity problems, and tensor eigenvalue complementarity problems. It also addresses higher-order diffusion tensor imaging, third-order symmetric and traceless tensors in liquid crystals, piezoelectric tensors, strong ellipticity for elasticity tensors, and higher-order tensors in quantum physics. This book is a valuable reference resource for researchers and graduate students who are interested in applications of tensor eigenvalues.

This book investigates the susceptibility of intrinsic physically unclonable function (PUF) implementations on reconfigurable hardware to optical semi-invasive attacks from the chip backside. It explores different classes of optical attacks, particularly photonic emission analysis, laser fault injection, and optical contactless probing. By applying these techniques, the book demonstrates that the secrets generated by a PUF can be predicted, manipulated or directly probed without affecting the behavior of the PUF. It subsequently discusses the cost and feasibility of launching such attacks against the very latest hardware technologies in a real scenario. The author discusses why PUFs are not tamper-evident in their current configuration, and therefore, PUFs alone cannot raise the security level of key storage. The author then reviews the potential and already implemented countermeasures, which can remedy PUFs' security-related shortcomings and make them resistant to optical side-channel and optical fault attacks. Lastly, by making selected modifications to the functionality of an existing PUF architecture, the book presents a prototype tamper-evident sensor for detecting optical contactless probing attempts.

This book presents the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Frontiers of Intelligent Computing: Theory and Applications (FICTA 2017), held in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The event brought together researchers, scientists, engineers, and practitioners to exchange their new ideas and experiences in the domain of intelligent computing theories with prospective applications to various engineering disciplines. The book is divided into two volumes: Information and Decision Sciences, and Intelligent Engineering Informatics. This volume covers broad areas of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, with papers exploring both the theoretical and practical aspects of various areas like ANN and genetic algorithms, human-computer interaction, intelligent control optimisation, intelligent e-learning systems, machine learning, mobile computing, multi-agent systems, etc. The book also offers a valuable resource for students at the post-graduate level in various engineering disciplines.

This book presents the proceedings of the Conference on Algorithms and Applications (ALAP 2018), which focuses on various areas of computing, like distributed systems and security, big data and analytics and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design. The book provides solutions to a broad class of problems in diverse areas of algorithms in our daily lives in a world designed for, and increasingly controlled by algorithms. Written by eminent personalities from academia and industry, the papers included offer insights from a number of perspectives, providing an overview of the state of the art in the field. The book consists of invited talks by respected speakers, papers presented in technical sessions, and tutorials to offer ideas, results, work-in-progress and experiences of various algorithmic aspects of computational science and engineering.

This book is about the computational aspects of invariant theory. Of central interest is the question how the invariant ring of a given group action can be calculated. Algorithms for this purpose form the main pillars around which the book is built. There are two introductory chapters, one on Groebner basis methods and one on the basic concepts of invariant theory, which prepare the ground for the algorithms. Then algorithms for computing invariants of finite and reductive groups are discussed. Particular emphasis lies on interrelations between structural properties of invariant rings and computational methods. Finally, the book contains a chapter on applications of invariant theory, covering fields as disparate as graph theory, coding theory, dynamical systems, and computer vision. The book is intended for postgraduate students as well as researchers in geometry, computer algebra, and, of course, invariant theory. The text is enriched with numerous explicit examples which illustrate the theory and should be of more than passing interest. More than ten years after the first publication of the book, the second edition now provides a major update and covers many recent developments in the field. Among the roughly 100 added pages there are two appendices, authored by Vladimi r Popov, and an addendum by Norbert A'Campo and Vladimir Popov.

This book constitutes the revised selected papers of the 12th Italian Workshop on Advances in Artificial Life, Evolutionary Computation, WIVACE 2017, held in Venice, Italy, in September 2017.The 23 full papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. They cover the following topics: physical-chemical phenomena; biological systems; economy and society; complexity; optimization.