Data Mining Methods for Knowledge Discovery provides an introduction to the data mining methods that are frequently used in the process of knowledge discovery. This book first elaborates on the fundamentals of each of the data mining methods: rough sets, Bayesian analysis, fuzzy sets, genetic algorithms, machine learning, neural networks, and preprocessing techniques. The book then goes on to thoroughly discuss these methods in the setting of the overall process of knowledge discovery. Numerous illustrative examples and experimental findings are also included. Each chapter comes with an extensive bibliography. Data Mining Methods for Knowledge Discovery is intended for senior undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a broad audience of professionals in computer and information sciences, medical informatics, and business information systems.

The volume "Fuzziness in Database Management Systems" is a highly informative, well-organized and up-to-date collection of contributions authored by many of the leading experts in its field. Among the contributors are the editors, Professors Patrick Bose and Janusz Kacprzyk, both of whom are known internationally. The book is like a movie with an all-star cast. The issue of fuzziness in database management systems has a long history. It begins in 1968 and 1971, when I spent my sabbatical leaves at the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose, California, as a visiting scholar. During these periods I was associated with Dr. E.F. Codd, the father of relational models of database systems, and came in contact with the developers ofiBMs System Rand SQL. These associations and contacts at a time when the methodology of relational models of data was in its formative stages, made me aware of the basic importance of such models and the desirability of extending them to fuzzy database systems and fuzzy query languages. This perception was reflected in my 1973 ffiM report which led to the paper on the concept of a linguistic variable and later to the paper on the meaning representation language PRUF (Possibilistic Relational Universal Fuzzy). More directly related to database issues during that period were the theses of my students V. Tahani, J. Yang, A. Bolour, M. Shen and R. Sheng, and many subsequent reports by both graduate and undergraduate students at Berkeley.

Cryptography, secret writing, is enjoying a scientific renaissance following the seminal discovery in 1977 of public-key cryptography and applications in computers and communications. This book gives a broad overview of public-key cryptography - its essence and advantages, various public-key cryptosystems, and protocols - as well as a comprehensive introduction to classical cryptography and cryptoanalysis. The second edition has been revised and enlarged especially in its treatment of cryptographic protocols. From a review of the first edition: "This is a comprehensive review ... there can be no doubt that this will be accepted as a standard text. At the same time, it is clearly and entertainingly written ... and can certainly stand alone." Alex M. Andrew, Kybernetes, March 1992

Information and communication technology (ICT) is permeating all aspects of service management; in the public sector, ICT is improving the capacity of government agencies to provide a wide array of innovative services that benefit citizens. E-Government is emerging as a multidisciplinary field of research based initially on empirical insights from practice. Efforts to theoretically anchor the field have opened perspectives from multiple research domains, as demonstrated in Practical Studies in E-Government. In this volume, the editors and contributors consider the evolution of the e-government field from both practical and research perspectives. Featuring in-depth case studies of initiatives in eight countries, the book deals with such technology-oriented issues as interoperability, prototyping, data quality, and advanced interfaces, and management-oriented issues as e-procurement, e-identification, election results verification, and information privacy. The book features best practices, tools for measuring and improving performance, and analytical methods for researchers.

Handbook of Economic Expectations discusses the state-of-the-art in the collection, study and use of expectations data in economics, including the modelling of expectations formation and updating, as well as open questions and directions for future research. The book spans a broad range of fields, approaches and applications using data on subjective expectations that allows us to make progress on fundamental questions around the formation and updating of expectations by economic agents and their information sets. The information included will help us study heterogeneity and potential biases in expectations and analyze impacts on behavior and decision-making under uncertainty.

Multivariate data analysis is a central tool whenever several variables need to be considered at the same time. The present book explains a powerful and versatile way to analyse data tables, suitable also for researchers without formal training in statistics.

This method for extracting useful information from data is demonstrated for various types of quality assessment, ranging from human quality perception via industrial quality monitoring to health quality and its molecular basis.

Key features include:

• Minimum mathematics; all technical details in appendix form
• Very accessible style with cartoons, self assessment questions and wide range of practical examples
• All data sets available FREE online on Chemometrics World (http://www.wiley.co.uk/wileychi/chemometrics).

The book is written with ISO certified businesses and laboratories in mind, to enhance Total Quality Management (TQM). As yet there are no clear guidelines for realistic data analysis of quality in complex systems - this volume bridges the gap.

Semantics, Web services, and Web processes promise better re-use, universal interoperability and integration. Semantics has been recognized as the primary tool to address the challenges of a broad spectrum of heterogeneity and for improving automation through machine understandable descriptions.

Semantic Web Services, Processes and Applications brings contributions from researchers who study, explore and understand the semantic enabling of all phases of semantic Web processes. This encompasses design, annotation, discovery, choreography and composition. Also this book presents fundamental capabilities and techniques associated with ontological modeling or services, annotation, matching and mapping, and reasoning. This is complemented by discussion of applications in e-Government and bioinformatics.

Special bulk rates are available for course adoption through Publishing Editor.

In the chapters in Part I of this textbook the author introduces the fundamental ideas of artificial intelligence and computational intelligence. In Part II he explains key AI methods such as search, evolutionary computing, logic-based reasoning, knowledge representation, rule-based systems, pattern recognition, neural networks, and cognitive architectures. Finally, in Part III, he expands the context to discuss theories of intelligence in philosophy and psychology, key applications of AI systems, and the likely future of artificial intelligence. A key feature of the author's approach is historical and biographical footnotes, stressing the multidisciplinary character of the field and its pioneers. The book is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in computer science, engineering, and other applied sciences, and the appendices offer short formal, mathematical models and notes to support the reader.

This book investigates the ways in which these systems can promote public value by encouraging the disclosure and reuse of privately-held data in ways that support collective values such as environmental sustainability. Supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the authors' research team has been working on one such system, designed to enhance consumers ability to access information about the sustainability of the products that they buy and the supply chains that produce them. Pulled by rapidly developing technology and pushed by budget cuts, politicians and public managers are attempting to find ways to increase the public value of their actions. Policymakers are increasingly acknowledging the potential that lies in publicly disclosing more of the data that they hold, as well as incentivizing individuals and organizations to access, use, and combine it in new ways. Due to technological advances which include smarter phones, better ways to track objects and people as they travel, and more efficient data processing, it is now possible to build systems which use shared, transparent data in creative ways. The book adds to the current conversation among academics and practitioners about how to promote public value through data disclosure, focusing particularly on the roles that governments, businesses and non-profit actors can play in this process, making it of interest to both scholars and policy-makers.

Decision diagrams (DDs) are data structures for efficient (time/space) representations of large discrete functions. In addition to their wide application in engineering practice, DDs are now a standard part of many CAD systems for logic design and a basis for severe signal processing algorithms. "Spectral Interpretation of Decision Diagrams" derives from attempts to classify and uniformly interpret DDs through spectral interpretation methods, relating them to different Fourier-series-like functional expressions for discrete functions and a group-theoretic approach to DD optimization. The book examines DDs found in literature and engineering practice and provides insights into relationships between DDs and different polynomial or spectral expressions for representation of discrete functions. In addition, it offers guidelines and criteria for selection of the most suitable representation in terms of space and time complexity. The work complements theory with numerous illustrative examples from practice. Moreover, the importance of DD representations to the verification and testing of arithmetic circuits is addressed, as well as problems related to various signal processing tasks.

Earth date, August 11, 1997 "Beam me up Scottie!" "We cannot do it! This is not Star Trek's Enterprise. This is early years Earth." True, this is not yet the era of Star Trek, we cannot beam captain James T. Kirk or captain Jean Luc Pickard or an apple or anything else anywhere. What we can do though is beam information about Kirk or Pickard or an apple or an insurance agent. We can beam a record of a patient, the status of an engine, a weather report. We can beam this information anywhere, to mobile workers, to field engineers, to a track loading apples, to ships crossing the Oceans, to web surfers. We have reached a point where the promise of information access anywhere and anytime is close to realization. The enabling technology, wireless networks, exists; what remains to be achieved is providing the infrastructure and the software to support the promise. Universal access and management of information has been one of the driving forces in the evolution of computer technology. Central computing gave the ability to perform large and complex computations and advanced information manipulation. Advances in networking connected computers together and led to distributed computing. Web technology and the Internet went even further to provide hyper-linked information access and global computing. However, restricting access stations to physical location limits the boundary of the vision.

Key to our culture is that we can disseminate information, and then maintain and access it over time. While we are rapidly advancing from vulnerable physical solutions to superior, digital media, preserving and using data over the long term involves complicated research challenges and organization efforts.

Uwe Borghoff and his coauthors address the problem of storing, reading, and using digital data for periods longer than 50 years. They briefly describe several markup and document description languages like TIFF, PDF, HTML, and XML, explain the most important techniques such as migration and emulation, and present the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) Reference Model. To complement this background information on the technology issues the authors present the most relevant international preservation projects, such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and experiences from sample projects run by the Cornell University Library and the National Library of the Netherlands. A rated survey list of available systems and tools completes the book.

With this broad overview, the authors address librarians who preserve our digital heritage, computer scientists who develop technologies that access data, and information managers engaged with the social and methodological requirements of long-term information access.

Information Systems and Data Compression presents a uniform approach and methodology for designing intelligent information systems. A framework for information concepts is introduced for various types of information systems such as communication systems, information storage systems and systems for simplifying structured information. The book introduces several new concepts and presents a novel interpretation of a wide range of topics in communications, information storage, and information compression. Numerous illustrations for designing information systems for compression of digital data and images are used throughout the book.

Fundamentals of Information Systems contains articles from the 7th International Workshop on Foundations of Models and Languages for Data and Objects (FoMLaDO '98), which was held in Timmel, Germany. These articles capture various aspects of database and information systems theory: identification as a primitive of database models deontic action programs marked nulls in queries topological canonization in spatial databases complexity of search queries complexity of Web queries attribute grammars for structured document queries hybrid multi-level concurrency control efficient navigation in persistent object stores formal semantics of UML reengineering of object bases and integrity dependence . Fundamentals of Information Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

This book presents a specific and unified approach to Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, termed IFN for Information Fuzzy Network methodology. Data Mining (DM) is the science of modelling and generalizing common patterns from large sets of multi-type data. DM is a part of KDD, which is the overall process for Knowledge Discovery in Databases. The accessibility and abundance of information today makes this a topic of particular importance and need. The book has three main parts complemented by appendices as well as software and project data that are accessible from the book's web site (http: //www.eng.tau.ac.iV-maimonlifn-kdg ). Part I (Chapters 1-4) starts with the topic of KDD and DM in general and makes reference to other works in the field, especially those related to the information theoretic approach. The remainder of the book presents our work, starting with the IFN theory and algorithms. Part II (Chapters 5-6) discusses the methodology of application and includes case studies. Then in Part III (Chapters 7-9) a comparative study is presented, concluding with some advanced methods and open problems. The IFN, being a generic methodology, applies to a variety of fields, such as manufacturing, finance, health care, medicine, insurance, and human resources. The appendices expand on the relevant theoretical background and present descriptions of sample projects (including detailed results)."

This comprehensive book offers a full picture of the cutting edge technologies in the area of "Multimedia Retrieval and Management". It addresses graduate students and scientists in electrical engineering and in computer science as well as system designers, engineers, programmers and other technical managers in the IT industries. The book provides a complete set of theories and technologies necessary for a profound introduction to the field. It includes multimedia low-level feature extraction and high-level semantic description in addition to multimedia authentication and watermarking, and the most up-to-date MPEG-7 standard. A broad range of practical applications is covered, e.g., digital libraries, medical images, biometrics, human palm-print and face-for-security, living plants data management and video-on-demand service.

This proceedings volume brings together the results of a corporate discussion on research, academic teaching and education in the field of business and economics in the context of globalization. The contributions examine leadership and sustainability, quality and governance and the internationalization of higher education. With a particular focus on business education and business schools, the book discusses the labor market and modernization as well as contemporary trends and challenges. By including both academic papers and contributions from industry, it forges research links between academia, business and industry.

This book provides a summary of the manifold audio- and web-based approaches to music information retrieval (MIR) research. In contrast to other books dealing solely with music signal processing, it addresses additional cultural and listener-centric aspects and thus provides a more holistic view. Consequently, the text includes methods operating on features extracted directly from the audio signal, as well as methods operating on features extracted from contextual information, either the cultural context of music as represented on the web or the user and usage context of music. Following the prevalent document-centered paradigm of information retrieval, the book addresses models of music similarity that extract computational features to describe an entity that represents music on any level (e.g., song, album, or artist), and methods to calculate the similarity between them. While this perspective and the representations discussed cannot describe all musical dimensions, they enable us to effectively find music of similar qualities by providing abstract summarizations of musical artifacts from different modalities. The text at hand provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the topics of music search, retrieval, and recommendation from an academic perspective. It will not only allow those new to the field to quickly access MIR from an information retrieval point of view but also raise awareness for the developments of the music domain within the greater IR community. In this regard, Part I deals with content-based MIR, in particular the extraction of features from the music signal and similarity calculation for content-based retrieval. Part II subsequently addresses MIR methods that make use of the digitally accessible cultural context of music. Part III addresses methods of collaborative filtering and user-aware and multi-modal retrieval, while Part IV explores current and future applications of music retrieval and recommendation.>

The book examines patterns of participation in human rights treaties. International relations theory is divided on what motivates states to participate in treaties, specifically human rights treaties. Instead of examining the specific motivations, this dissertation examines patterns of participation. In doing so, it attempts to match theoretical expectations of state behavior with participation. This book provides significant evidence that there are multiple motivations that lead states to participate in human rights treaties.

This book contains a selection of the best papers given at an international conference on advanced computer systems. The Advanced Computer Systems Conference was held in October 2006, in Miedzyzdroje, Poland. The book is organized into four topical areas: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Security and Safety; Image Analysis, Graphics and Biometrics; and Computer Simulation and Data Analysis.

Searching for Semantics: Data Mining, Reverse Engineering Stefano Spaccapietra Fred M aryanski Swiss Federal Institute of Technology University of Connecticut Lausanne, Switzerland Storrs, CT, USA REVIEW AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS In the last few years, database semantics research has turned sharply from a highly theoretical domain to one with more focus on practical aspects. The DS- 7 Working Conference held in October 1997 in Leysin, Switzerland, demon strated the more pragmatic orientation of the current generation of leading researchers. The papers presented at the meeting emphasized the two major areas: the discovery of semantics and semantic data modeling. The work in the latter category indicates that although object-oriented database management systems have emerged as commercially viable prod ucts, many fundamental modeling issues require further investigation. Today's object-oriented systems provide the capability to describe complex objects and include techniques for mapping from a relational database to objects. However, we must further explore the expression of information regarding the dimensions of time and space. Semantic models possess the richness to describe systems containing spatial and temporal data. The challenge of in corporating these features in a manner that promotes efficient manipulation by the subject specialist still requires extensive development."